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Fantasy
 Fantasy
How It Works

B R I A N ATT E B E RY
 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom
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© Brian Attebery 2022
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First Edition published in 2022
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Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
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 Acknowledgments

Thanks to Sylvia Kelso and Salvatore Proietti for permission to

include quotations from correspondence.
Chapter 5 is based on a talk titled “James Tiptree Jr. Book Club;
or, A Mitochondrial Theory of Literature,” given at the 2016 Tiptree
Symposium at the University of Oregon, which honored Ursula K. Le
Guin. My thanks to Linda Long for organizing the symposium and to
Andrea Hairston, Salvatore Proietti, and Ellen Klages for their helpful
suggestions. An earlier version was published online at Tor.com on
December 12, 2016: www.tor.com/2016/12/12/the-james-tiptree-jr-
book-club-or-a-mitochondrial-theory-of-literature/
 Contents

Introduction: Speaking of Fantasy

1. How Fantasy Means: The Shape of Truth

2. Realism and the Structures of Fantasy: The Family Story

3. Neighbors, Myths, and Fantasy

4. If Not Conflict, Then What? Metaphors for Narrative Interest

5. A Mitochondrial Theory of Literature: Fantasy and

Intertextuality

6. Young Adult Dystopias and Yin Adult Utopias

7. Gender and Fantasy: Employing Fairy Tales

8. The Politics of Fantasy

9. Timor mortis conturbat me: Fantasy and Fear

10. How Fantasy Means and What It Does: Some Propositions

Works Cited
Index
 Introduction
Speaking of Fantasy

The nature of fantasy literature keeps changing. New voices come

into the field, new traditions are drawn upon, innovations from other
genres cross over, markets shift, social and philosophical concerns
are different. A comprehensive survey from a decade or two ago
now feels like a threadbare blanket covering some spots but leaving
others exposed. And theories of fantasy developed to fit the eras of
George MacDonald and William Morris or, more recently, Diana
Wynne Jones and Terry Pratchett must be reformulated to fit Marlon
James, Ken Liu, Aliette de Bodard, and Nnedi Okorafor. Yet the
newer writers are also responding to their predecessors; there is
continuity as well as change. This book is a snapshot of the current
moment but it is also an attempt to read the present through the
past and the past in the present.
Fantasy in any era presents some of the same challenges: to go
outside conventional notions of the real, to trace connections that
evade common-sense thought, and to tell lies that ring true. The
answers keep shifting but the questions are pretty much
inescapable. I believe that they all come down to variations on two
central lines of inquiry. First, how does fantasy mean? How can a
form of storytelling based on altering physical laws and denying facts
about the past be at the same time a source of insight into human
nature and the workings of the world? Second, what does fantasy
do? What kind of social, political, cultural, intellectual work does it
perform in the world—the world of the reader, that is, not that of the
characters?
Each chapter of this book addresses these questions by focusing
on a particular aspect of fantastic world-building and storytelling. It
is impossible to separate those two activities because fantasy
creates story-worlds: narrated spaces in which causality and
character and consequence are inextricably entwined. This notion of
a world that is also a set of narrative practices and possibilities is
very close to Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of chronotope or time-space.
Story-worlds are different from settings as perceived in realistic
fiction—though not completely different. Real-world settings and
plots are always more conventional, more genre-driven than they
appear. It’s just that the setting of a non-fantastic story can be
assimilated into and extended by our knowledge of mundane history,
geography, and society. Dickens’s London is adjacent to, though not
identical to, the Victorian London reconstructed by historians.
Looking at realism from the standpoint of fantasy can make us more
aware of the choices that go into the illusion that any stories
adequately represent or reproduce reality. In realism, a lot of work
goes into concealing the constructedness of the situation and the
mechanisms of the plot. The subgenre of children’s literature known
as the family story is a good example of this willed invisibility. It is
also a test case for the idea that fiction cannot be both realistic and
fantastic at once. My first two chapters are thus mirror images of
one another. The first asks how fantasy is true, the second looks at
the artifice that underlies one variety of realism.
Chapter three is about the mythic sources of fantasy: something I
have previously devoted an entire book to. This time around I’m
looking at the way contemporary fantasies address the clash
between mythic systems. In the modern world, particularly in urban
environments, groups who might once have lived in isolation from
one another and thus never faced serious challenges to their world
views or the sacred stories through which those world views are
passed on, now live beside and interact with people with radically
different cultural narratives. The integrative structure that fantasy
inherits from fairy tale offers glimpses of reconciliation between
competing stories and the people whose understanding is based on
those stories. Helene Wecker’s The Golem and the Jinni (2013), for
example, depicts diverse groups of immigrants in early 20th-century
New York City and imagines that they have brought with them not
only their foodways and family structures but also their supernatural
beings. If a single neighborhood can house both a Jewish
homunculus and an Arabic fire spirit, then interactions will extend
from shop and street corner to the realms of the Platonic ideal and
the divine. Neighbors nod to one another and universes collide,
perhaps to find some sort of detente. Fantasy offers ways to situate
conflicting beliefs within alternate narrative frameworks—alternate in
the sense of both “other” and “alternating.”
Chapter four focuses on the dynamics of story: the mechanism
that impels the narrative and engages the reader. This narrative
mainspring is usually described in terms of conflict, and yet conflict
is only one form of resistance to the characters’ desires, one hurdle
between them and a happy ending. Most uses of the word are
metaphorical: the “conflict” between humans and nature, for
instance, is something else entirely. Fantasy offers other ways to
engage us, to keep us in suspense, to reward our anxieties. By doing
so, it offers alternative scripts for interaction, ways to bypass rather
than engender conflict. A major example here is Patricia McKillip’s
The Bards of Bone Plain (2010), which frustrates attempts to read it
in terms of an overreaching conflict but richly rewards analysis of its
multiple forms of illusion and misperception.
In chapter five, I propose a way to look at the interconnectedness
of literature. Source and influence studies, theories of intertexuality
and metafiction, and the very notion of genre are all attempts to
explain how works of literature talk with one another. Like human
beings, they assemble selves out of bits of other subjectivities and
echoes of other voices. My proposal focuses on one particular branch
of the fantastic, science fiction, and yokes together two metaphors.
In the first, literature is a book club, a social structure built around
shared experiences and an exchange of insights. In the second,
texts are cells deriving their energy from other organisms that they
have taken in and incorporated into their metabolisms:
mitochondria. The latter metaphor is fetched pretty far and
undoubtedly dependent on my imperfect understanding of the
science involved. But what could be more appropriate for an
exploration of science fiction, which does glorious things with
imperfectly understood science?
With chapter six, the emphasis shifts from the semiotics of
fantasy to its social functions. Part of the cultural work of the
fantastic is to tell us that things need not be the way they are. The
world could be, if not better, at least run on different principles. We
generally separate this function off into a separate genre—utopia,
accompanied by its evil twin dystopia. Yet the utopian impulse runs
through many forms of the fantastic, from arcadian romance to
science fiction. In this chapter, I look at the young adult dystopia,
which became a publishing fad in the early years of this century in
the wake of Suzanne Collins’s wildly popular Hunger Games trilogy.
Taking cues from Tom Moylan’s notion of the critical utopia and
Ursula K. Le Guin’s sorting out of yin and yang utopias, I suggest we
look for the glimpse of hope in the darkest dystopias and seek out
stories that offer more positive social visions even for teenagers,
who, as my friend Mike Levy used to say, love dystopias because
they live in dystopia.
Chapter seven moves to fairy tales, and specifically to fairy-tale
retellings by male writers. The impact of fairy tales on girls and
women has been reported extensively and studied intensively by
cultural critics, folklorists, and scholars and producers of literature.
Important examples include Kay Stone’s 1975 essay “Things Walt
Disney Never Told Us,” Jack Zipes’s anthology Don’t Bet on the
Prince (1987), and Angela Carter’s subversive takes on Perrault’s
tales in her collection The Bloody Chamber (1979). It wasn’t until I
was teaching a course in gender and fantasy at Hollins University,
and one of my students asked where were the fairy tales for abused
boys, that I began to realize how little had attention had been paid
to uses of fantasy for exploring and revising models of masculinity.
In this chapter I look at stories by Neil Gaiman, Michael
Cunningham, Hans Christian Andersen, and other men who have
employed fairy-tale motifs in exposing damaging patterns of
masculine behavior and attempting to construct more eutopian
models of gender.
Chapter eight comes back to fantasy proper and asks what is
political about the form itself. Is fantasy an inherently reactionary
genre, as many (especially those who contrast it with science fiction)
claim, or do its disruptions and revisions of the world offer
something politically progressive or even radical? The trial run for
this chapter was an address from a couple of decades ago that I
titled “The Politics (if any) of Fantasy.” In the meantime, both the
political landscape and the genre have changed. I have dropped the
parenthetical quibble and written a new analysis that, though tacitly
in dialogue with the original speech, brings in a number of new
examples and a new framework based on the idea of fantasy’s
particular affordances. Considering fantasy as a tool, what is it good
for, and why, with regard to political analysis and activism?
Chapter nine is about what fantasy has to offer in the way of
addressing fear. It may not be obvious that the impetus for this
chapter, too, was political. Increasingly, fear and suspicion are
roused by politicians and media conglomerates to attract supporters
and subscribers and to keep them in line. If you can make strangers
look like enemies and enemies look like monsters, you can justify
any form of abuse—and make people pay for their own oppression.
Fear turns off rational thought and alters perceptions; it can also be
exciting and even addictive. There are works of fantasy that resort
to pushing these sorts of emotional buttons, but the genre also
offers ways to turn mindless fear into something else. Anyone who
works through the fantasies of Tolkien, Le Guin, or their peers—or
rather, anyone who lets those fantasies work through them—will find
new resources to deal with fears great and small, even timor mortis,
the dread of death.
These chapters represent my usual working method. I’ll notice a
loose thread in the fabric of literature, start tugging at it, see where
the seams come apart, and ask what that tells us about the original
garment. If I’m lucky, some sort of thesis emerges along the way,
but it’s never something I started out to prove, nor do I begin with a
particular theory that I want to demonstrate. This method doesn’t
make it easy to extract the core ideas for application elsewhere.
Accordingly, I have added a short final chapter summarizing
discoveries, as plainly stated and as logically organized as I can
make them, my very modest version of a Wittgensteinian tractatus. I
would not recommend skipping ahead to this chapter for the good
stuff: the fun is in the unfolding, at least for me in writing, and, in
my experience, for audiences as well. The summary may be most
useful for people who want to raise objections, since I make all my
claims there as baldly as possible.
And I know that some will disagree, since I have tried all these
ideas out on audiences. The title of this introduction is literal. Each
chapter is based on a public talk about something related to what
John Clute calls fantastika, meaning the larger territory of the
fantastic, which extends from fairy tale to utopian science fiction. I
have been fortunate enough to have many chances to think out
loud, in public, about the literature of the unreal. That means I have
watched audiences respond with varying mixtures of amusement,
boredom, surprise, confusion, and enlightenment. When invited to
speak on the same subject more than once, I’ve had the chance to
try out different formulations, to throw out obvious clangers, and to
update references. I have also had to listen to myself repeatedly.
Since no one is easier to bore than oneself, I have been motivated to
be more succinct, more concrete, more entertaining. I’ve grown
conscious of habits of speech and thought, but also noticed lines of
inquiry I didn’t realize I was pursuing. Two of those emerged over
time to become the core questions of this entire project: how
fantasy means and what it does.
The first question echoes a title by John Ciardi: How Does a Poem
Mean? (1959). Ciardi, a practical critic in the tradition of I. A.
Richards, rightly shifted the emphasis from what poetry means to
how, since any poem worth the breath it takes to utter it means
both too many things to reckon, and nothing but itself. “Meanings”
as we usually assign to them to poetry, are interpretations, and thus
translations of the poem into more expository, less powerful
language. Despite the well-known Italian saying about translation as
betrayal—traduttore, traditore—some interpretations are not so
much traitorous as illuminating, never replacing the poem itself but
embellishing and enhancing our readings of it, like illuminations in a
medieval manuscript. With fantasy, the problem is less with
interpretation than with application. A mode that begins by denying
its own veracity is hard to pin down to any truth. How can an unreal
world represent real experience? What do elves and dragons have to
do with the price of eggs or the value of friendship?
Since a problem is also an opportunity, I take fantasy’s apparent
disavowal of reference, relevance, and realism as an invitation to
think laterally, symbolically, and structurally. In the chapters that
follow, I am deeply indebted to the insights of fantasy writers such
as J. R. R. Tolkien, George MacDonald, and Ursula K. Le Guin, as
well as to fellow readers and scholars of the fantastic. I have been
speaking of fantasy—and listening to others speak about it—for
pretty much my entire academic life. Each of these chapters is an
extension of a conversation begun in a classroom or at a gathering
such as the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts.
Each is full of borrowings from and unconscious echoes of my
students, friends, and colleagues. Many of them were in the
audiences I was speaking to as I developed impressions into more
formal arguments. They didn’t hesitate to pin me down or correct
my worst mistakes. I am grateful to have had the opportunity to look
people in the eye as I made statements about fantasy’s capacity for
meaning, statements that often felt outrageous or banal or both at
once when I wrote them, but which sometimes seemed to strike a
chord in listeners.
If my first question is indebted to Ciardi, my second is an outright
theft from Jane Tompkins, whose book Sensational Designs: The
Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790–1850 (1986) introduced me
to the idea that literature might actually do something other than
just sit there and look pretty. The word “work” might make literature
sound earnest and drab, but if we think of fiction not as performing
good works like a charitable Victorian but as working on us,
changing us, challenging us, and enabling us to remake the world,
then Tompkins’s notion of cultural work becomes a powerful tool for
investigating power and pretense and injustice and ignorance
through the reading of literature. And, yes, fantasy too performs
work in the world, though perhaps not in ways as obvious as
Tompkins’s core example Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which made it
impossible to claim that slavery was anything but evil. Fantasy tends
to work indirectly, just as it means obliquely. And its work is bound
up in its playfulness: to read fantasy attentively and seriously is to
value its capacity for fun and games. It often works—that is, does its
work—by undercutting the solemnity with which we approach love,
or authority, or the gods.
So I have been going around saying to audiences that fantasy
does this or that, and I can attest that it does those things for at
least some of the people who listened and questioned and reacted.
Their nods and frowns and laughter have shaped this book. Criticism
is conversation, as Kenneth Burke reminded us with his parable
about learning to write critically: the beginning critic has just entered
a room where a lively discussion has been going on for some time
and must listen, gradually venture a comment or two, and adapt to
the tone and temper of the room. With some literary topics, that
conversation is pretty obscure, owned by a few cognoscenti and
couched in insider language. But with fantasy, the conversation
sprawls from classrooms to coffee shops to basements where a lively
game of Dungeons and Dragons has been going on for years. People
read fantasy for pleasure, and they talk about it online and IRL. That
is both a challenge and a boon to the academic critic—which is to
say, to me. When I write about fantasy, I know I am making claims
about something people care about and something about which my
listeners might have exhaustive knowledge. If those people matter,
then fantasy matters.
Earlier work on fantasy—and not just mine—tended toward the
apologetic. Going back at least to Tolkien and Lewis, commentators
on the fantastic could assume a skeptical reception from the literary
establishment. Hence the need to establish a pedigree for modern
fantasy: this is the stuff Homer sang and Shakespeare’s troupe
played; modern fantasy deserves respect as the true heir to
medieval romance and surrealism and contemporary magical
realism! All that is still true but it’s less necessary: the battle has
been won in all but a few snobbish magazines and classrooms where
aging professors lecture from yellowing notes. Fantasy pervades
modern culture, and not just print culture. Now it seems to me that
a more urgent defense is needed to justify studying stories at all.
The humanities, including the once respected English major, are
under attack from politicians and career counselors and bean-
counting administrators. Never mind how many studies show the
career benefits—even in the business world—of studying history and
philosophy and languages and literatures. There may be a political
motivation behind this attack: people who read well and carefully are
harder to fool. They are likely to think for themselves, and to
empathize with the Other who is being so carefully set up as a
scapegoat.
So how does fantasy fit into this new battle plan? No longer
outcast within elite culture, it may well be the humanities’ new
champion. Its pervasiveness might well be the strongest argument
for the value of making up and studying stories. One of Ursula K. Le
Guin’s short stories, “Ether, OR,” (1995, about a little Oregon town
that wanders from mountains to desert to seacoast), is dedicated
“To the Narrative Americans.” We are all Narrative Americans, or
Africans, or Australians; we are all descended from storytelling
ancestors with whom we might or might not share blood or genes. It
behooves us to know ourselves and our cultural DNA. One of the
oldest strands of that DNA is visionary storytelling, which is to say,
fantasy. By speaking of fantasy, we pass it on and maybe give it a
boost along the way.
Even if I had room to thank everyone with whom I’ve had
instructive and encouraging conversations over the years, I would be
sure to forget someone important, so I won’t try to list them all. I
owe special thanks, however, to those who made it possible for me
to spend half of 2019 as Leverhulme Visiting Professor at the
University of Glasgow, with frequent excursions to other parts of the
UK and France. A majority of these chapters were tested on
audiences during that stay. Rob Maslen wrote the proposal which the
Leverhulme Trust funded; Head of School Alice Jenkins was
tremendously supportive. Farah Mendlesohn, Maria Nikolajeva,
Andrew Butler, and Marek Oziewicz offered invaluable assistance and
advice. Students, faculty, and staff at the School of Critical Studies
were amazing, as were my hosts everywhere I went. I have had
wonderful conversations closer to home with my graduate students
and assistants on the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts: Monty
Vierra, Kristi Austin, Tiffany Brooke Martin, Jennifer Cox, Paul
Williams. You are all my collaborators, but the mistakes are mine
alone.
 1
How Fantasy Means
The Shape of Truth

It cannot help having some meaning; if it have proportion and

harmony it has vitality, and vitality is truth. The beauty may be plainer
in it than the truth, but without the truth the beauty could not be, and
the fairytale would give no delight.
George MacDonald, “The Fantastic Imagination”, 1893

Fantasy is the lie that speaks truth. The lying part is easy to point to:
dragons, spells, places that never were. The question of how fantasy
tells truth is a little trickier, and more interesting. I will suggest three
ways. First, it can be mythically true: true to the traditional beliefs
and narratives through which people have long understood the world
and ourselves. Mythic stories not only delineate the universe but also
authorize social structures like clans, classes, and gender roles as
well as rites and religious obligations. They are tremendously
important whether we believe in them or not, but they often come
packaged in ways that signify the past rather than the present or the
future. They reside in books, covered in footnotes and dust, rather
than emerging from living performance: dance, ritual theater,
painting in sand or mud, stories recounted by elders. In Stories
about Stories (2014), I argued that fantasy is one of the main
techniques for reimagining our relationships with traditional myth—
for instance, trying to move a mythic idea out of what Raymond
Williams calls residual culture and into dominant or emergent culture
(Williams 1977, 122).
 A second way fantasy can be true is metaphorically. A dragon
might not be a dragon but a human tyrant, or a desire to talk with
animals, or an uncontrollable force of nature like a tidal wave or a
volcano. Or all of those things at once, since a single text can
support more than one analogical reading. This is the kind of reading
that can look like allegory, but Tolkien warns us against equating the
two. Allegories set up a one-to-one correspondence between, say, a
historical event and a fantastic quest, and they are essentially closed
systems. But metaphors, according to George Lakoff and Mark
Johnson in Metaphors We Live By (1980), are ways of using one
entire realm of experience to puzzle out another, as when we
compare love to a battleground. They are open-ended: limited only
by our familiarity with what Lakoff and Johnson call the source
domain and our ability to imagine the target domain. Most
importantly, metaphors carry us across the gap between the known
and the unknown. Metaphor is a mode of thought, a way to
comprehend new experiences in terms of older ones without
claiming identity between them—even though the classic verbal
formula for a metaphor looks like a statement of identity: my love is
a rose, your boss is a pig, the day is on fire. All those metaphors
depend not only on our recognition of the aptness of the comparison
but also on the incompleteness of the equation: on the “not really”
implied in the “is.” If I actually fell in love with a flower or you truly
worked for a barnyard animal, there would be no shock of discovery.
Many of the core functions in fantasy—which is to say, the
magical operations—can be read as literalized metaphors. George
MacDonald, whose comments on fantasy and truth are quoted at the
top of this chapter, understood this very well. His most transparent
example is the tale “The Light Princess” (1864), in which the title
character lacks gravity, both literally and figuratively. The metaphor
is deftly sustained from the early scene in which the infant princess
is inadequately secured to her crib and nearly floats out the window
to the resolution in which love and sorrow finally anchor her to the
earth. Lightness and weight, levity and gravity, restriction and
freedom are running themes throughout, as MacDonald reminds us
that the linkage is already there in our language but that we forget
to imagine it concretely. He gives us back the living metaphor and at
the same time reminds us that the claim “Love is Gravity” is as
untrue as it is true, even according to the ground rules of his
fantastic tale. To literalize a metaphor is not to collapse it into a
tautology.
Many metaphors, and especially the ones we find in tales like
MacDonald’s, come from folk tradition, as myths do. Traditional
riddles are based on unexpected metaphoric linkages: an egg is a
box with a golden secret inside, silence is the thing that can be
broken just by saying its name. Because such riddling is rare in
contemporary culture, we are less adept at thinking metaphorically
than our ancestors were. Folklorist Barre Toelken makes a strong
case for the sophisticated metaphoric cognition recorded within
traditional ballads such as “One Morning in May.” Traditional singers
and their audiences didn’t need scholars to tell them that a fiddle
and bow might stand for body parts, or that one could talk about
sex in terms of making hay or plucking cherries. As Toelken says of a
ballad in which a fiddle is smuggled out of Italy hidden in the
fiddler’s pants,

The flap of the pants does indeed conceal something, but it is perfectly clear
to everyone just what is being concealed. The concealment itself is not a
secret, nor is it a euphemism. It is a culturally meaningful way of playing
with what everyone knows is there. (19)

What flatfooted, Freudian explanations of traditional songs and

stories lose is the playfulness that comes from saying and not saying
at the same time, and from relishing the paradox of the is that isn’t.
This playful ambiguity carries over from traditional narratives to
literary adaptations and imitations of them—that is, to modern,
myth-based fantasy. Riddles and fairy tales are not myths, but they
share with myth a complex perspective on meaning: in all of these
oral forms, any object can take on unexpected significance, usually
coded as magic, as the story surrounding it begins to generate
meanings beyond the literal. Some images are almost impossible to
separate from their mythic avatars: doves, flames, drops of blood.
Others are unlikely bearers of metaphoric weight and yet in the right
narrative frame, they begin to whisper oracularly and to offer
glimpses of the numinous: a handful of pomegranate seeds in the
story of Persephone, a spider’s web in Navajo creation stories.
In that sense, all myths are also riddles, to which the answers are
(depending on the seeker’s questions) God, spirit, the universe, fate,
ourselves. Riddles, in turn, are games, but they are games that can
suddenly grow terrifyingly portentous. A number of fantasies
incorporate traditional riddles and riddling ballads. Examples include
The Hobbit (1937), with the riddling contest between Bilbo and
Gollum; Ellen Kushner’s Thomas the Rhymer (1990), in which the
protagonist must solve ballads such as “The Famous Flower of
Servingmen” and “The Unquiet Grave” as if they were riddles about
his own experience; Diana Wynne Jones’s Fire and Hemlock (1984),
which challenges the reader with metaphoric connections between
the heroine’s life and the ballads of “Tam Lin” and “Thomas the
Rhymer”; and Edward Fenton’s children’s fantasy The Nine Questions
(1959), which takes its situation and structure from the first two
ballads in Francis James Child’s authoritative collection, “Riddles
Wisely Expounded,” and “The Elfin Knight.” That last example (a
lovely book, sadly forgotten) demonstrates that not only are the first
two of my forms of fantastic truth, myth and metaphor, closely
related, but the third, structure, is as well. Each of Fenton’s chapters
is modeled after a verse of the ballad; each verse poses a riddle; the
final riddle unlocks the meaning of all.
The third kind of truth in fantasy is the one I want to explore in
more depth here. Fantasy can be structurally true. It represents the
shape of the world, and especially the shape of change. Such
change can be reflected in the grammar of titles, with their frequent
beginnings and endings: The Ice Is Coming (Patricia Wrightson,
1977), The Dark Is Rising (Susan Cooper, 1973), Cloud’s End (Sean
Stewart, 1996), The End of the Game (Sheri S. Tepper, 1986), The
Beginning Place (Ursula K. Le Guin, 1980). Le Guin’s title also shows
how change over time can be represented spatially: with a place
that is also a moment of transformation. Fantasy bookshelves are full
(at least mine are) of titles naming liminal spaces: doors, gates,
paths, roads, woods. If there is no word in the title designating a
cosmic shift or precession, or the spatialized equivalent of one of
those, the plot will almost inevitably hinge upon a prophetic
utterance or catchphrase leading to a change of regime and scenes
of destruction and recreation. This may seem like an obvious point:
of course there is change; every story involves change. Yet the kinds
of change represented in fantasy differ from the altered
circumstances in realistic fiction, which more often involve the
characters’ external circumstances or inner lives rather than the sort
of shake-up that alters the way the world works.
Again, such shifts can be portrayed in terms of transformed
spaces rather than, or in addition to, changes over time. A good
example is the wave of magic that rises in Elfland and sweeps over
the previously mundane realm of Erl at the end of Lord Dunsany’s
The King of Elfland’s Daughter (1924):
And on the one side she saw the fields we know, full of accustomed things,
and on the other, looking down from her height, she saw, behind the
myriad-tinted border, the deep green elfin foliage and Elfland’s magical
flowers, and things that delirium sees not, nor inspiration, on Earth; and the
fabulous creatures of Elfland prancing forward; and, stepping across our
fields and bringing Elfland with her, the twilight flowing from both her
hands, which she stretched out a little from her, was her own lady the
Princess Lirazel coming back to her home. (237)

The power of this scene is in the simultaneous senses of recovery

and loss it entails. Time has been traded away for eternity, and it is
not entirely a good bargain. Elfland comes to Erl as Birnam Wood
comes to Dunsinane, with all the consequence but none of the
fakery. It is no accident that Dunsany describes the change in terms
of different ways of experiencing time: “it came with all manner of
memories, old music and lost voices, sweeping back again to our old
fields what time had driven from Earth” (236). Anything that conveys
decrepitude or loss gives way to agelessness and flowers blooming
out of season, and the result is not so much comfort as eeriness.
One island of mortality remains, a monastery around which the
magical wave splits and passes, and it is described in a way that
suggests all that Elfland lacks:

For the sound of his bell beat back the rune and the twilight for a little
distance all round. There he lived happy, contented, not quite alone,
amongst his holy things, for a few that had been cut off by that magical tide
lived on the holy island and served him there. And he lived beyond the age
of ordinary men, but not to the years of magic. (241)

Tolkien picked up on this contrast between mortal men, who long for
deathlessness, and elves, who long for an escape from
deathlessness. Yet in neither Tolkien nor Dunsany is it just a theme,
but rather a structuring device for plot and setting and sequence,
which are all of a piece. This is what M. M. Bakhtin means by
chronotope: the time that is also space, and a corresponding range
of possible character types (to occupy the space) and incidents (to
take up the time). Bakhtin’s chronotopes are features of genres, and
the representation of the structure of change is something the
fantasy chronotope does exceedingly well.
But what does it mean? How are we to take an inundation by
magic as a truth about our own lives? We are none of us elves; our
temptation is always going to be that of mortal beings rather than
weary immortals.
Again, we can look to myth and see similar world-remakings: the
Flood in Genesis; the succession of ages in Hindu myth from a
golden Time of Truth to Kali Yuga, the Age of Strife; the advent of
Ragnarök, the Norse Twilight of the Gods. Each of these
transformations can be taken as a literal representation of the
ancient past or a prophecy of end times, but it can also be seen as a
way of locating ourselves in time and in the universe. The
transformation is in the self as much as in the world, and fantasy
provides a way to depict the structures even of inner changes like
growth and desire and selfhood as well as more visible ones like the
building of a castle or the fall of a kingdom.
 Here it is worth pointing out a fundamental difference between
form and structure. Form is evident on the surface, visible to the
naked eye. For instance, two kinds of wings—that of a dragonfly and
that of a bat—look equivalent in form and yet their inner anatomy
and evolutionary history are nothing alike. Two houses can have the
same profile and the same footprint on the ground, even be covered
with the same paint or plaster, and yet be radically different in
construction. Realism is very good at depicting form: social forms,
forms of selfhood. Fantasy is better at probing hidden structure:
fundamental building blocks and the way they articulate.
In another fairy tale by George MacDonald, The Princess and the
Goblin (1872/1893), Princess Irene lives in a building that is in a
perpetual state of transition: “a large house, half castle, half
farmhouse, on the side of another mountain, about half way
between its base and its peak” (1). Growing up, she is only aware of
the main floors, until one day she gets lost and comes across a
mysterious stairway leading to a tower where she meets a woman
who is both old and beautiful, who introduces herself as Irene’s
great-great-grandmother. None of the staff are aware of this
mysterious grandmother, who keeps a flock of pigeons as
messengers, has a lamp that shines through the walls like a beacon,
and spins a thread so fine as to be invisible—all forms of guidance
for the Princess and the young miner Curdie who comes to be her
friend and companion in adventure.
Beneath the house, by contrast, a gang of goblins has been
tunneling through the foundations with the intention of kidnapping
the Princess to be their prince’s bride. The goblins are crude and
impulsive, capable of violence but also comically inept. The place
they break through into the house, significantly, is the wine cellar,
where the butler is able to distract them by offering drink.
The Princess’s house is thus arranged in tiers by class, upstairs-
downstairs fashion, but also by virtue or wisdom. At the very top is
the great-great-grandmother, wise and magical; at the bottom are
the animalistic goblins, below even the servants in the kitchen;
Princess Irene lives in between and is the only one who can move
between the ranks, threatened by the goblins but protected by her
ancestor. It is tempting—though anachronistic—to read the whole
set-up as a Freudian allegory. Down in the depths is the id; up top is
the superego; in between is Irene the ego, negotiating between
primal appetites and societal constraints. But we don’t need Freud to
find symbolism in this edifice; MacDonald was trained as a minister
but also educated in science; he attended lectures in medicine at the
University of Edinburgh, where theories of the unconscious were
being worked out before Freud. He was quite aware both of the
power of symbols and of the tricks the brain can play upon itself,
and many of his stories incorporate striking symbols of the psyche:
the Golden Key that leads Mossy and Tangle on a lifelong quest in
the story with that title (1867); the animal hooves and paws that
Curdie is able to perceive under the hands of evildoers in the sequel
to Princess; and especially the egglike space—essentially a sensory
deprivation chamber—to which the title character of Lilith (1895)
retreats to contemplate her own ego.
If we think of the self as a house, other forms of literature than
fantasy are better at showing us its outward aspects. Realism
confronts us with the daily travails, the emotions, the economic and
social exchanges that we might think are the whole story. But
fantasy can do something quite different. It looks at the soul from
high above the roof, from deep in the foundations, from inside the
walls themselves. By renouncing surface fidelity, a fantastic tale can
reveal fundamental patterns of stress and support. It shows us the
laying of foundation stones. It shows us where fatal cracks will
appear, and what might crawl out of the ruins. Edgar Allan Poe’s
“The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839) is a perfect example of that
last, and it is no accident that “House of Usher” is an ambiguous
phrase, designating both the physical building and the family that
erected it and will ultimately collapse with it.
In Poe’s tale, the Usher family has come down to two individuals.
Twins Roderick and Madeline are locked in a love-hate relationship
that eventually results in their mutual murders. Roderick prematurely
buries a catatonic Madeline, who rises from the tomb to strangle him
and thus to bring down house and House. Essentially brother, sister,
and dwelling share a single soul. This is one of the ways fantasy
represents a complex selfhood: by dividing it among different
entities, each of which stands for a single faculty or facet of the
whole.
Another example of this sort of distributive psyche is the triad of
Queen Orual, the goddess Ungit, and Orual’s sister Psyche in C. S.
Lewis’s Till We Have Faces (1956). The text is full of indications that
each is a part of the other, and all of a greater self. “I am Ungit,”
says Orual (276). “You also are Psyche,” Orual is told by the voice of
the god (308). And “We’re all limbs and parts of one Whole,” says
the memory or vision of her tutor; “Hence, of each other. Men, and
gods, flow in and out and mingle” (300–1).
Less explicitly, there is The Lord of the Rings, which Ursula K. Le
Guin reads, in an essay titled “Science Fiction and Mrs. Brown,” as
an exploration of a divided self, with not only Gollum and Sméagol
(who share a body) but also Frodo and Samwise as aspects of a
single complex character. Le Guin points out that the technique
comes out of traditional storytelling:

as traditional myths and folktales break the complex conscious daylight

personality into its archetypal unconscious dreamtime components, Mrs.
Brown becoming a princess, a toad, a worm, a witch, a child—so Tolkien in
his wisdom broke Frodo into four: Frodo, Sam, Sméagol, and Gollum….
(103)

Here she is contrasting fantastic storytelling with the best of realism:

Mrs. Brown is a character invented by Virginia Woolf to represent the
hidden complexities and irreducible individuality of even the least
prepossessing of humans. Tolkien’s characters have the same
complexity and individuality but split as if by a prism. Le Guin turns
to Jung to name the parts of the self as archetypes, just as I
reached for Freud to describe the house-self in Princess, but such
splintered selves are too ancient and too common to fit any one
psychological or psychoanalytic theory. The method should be
credited to storytellers rather than analysts, and deserves a name of
its own; I suggest calling it distributive selfhood.
 Here are some other instances:

• the house of Gormenghast and its residents in Mervyn Peake’s

trilogy of that name (1946–59).
• alternative versions of individuals spread across the multiverse
in Diana Wynne Jones’s Chrestomanci books, beginning with
Charmed Life (1977).
• the various “J” characters—all of the same genotype but raised
in different societies—in Joanna Russ’s utopia/dystopia The
Female Man (1975).
• three recurring, possibly reincarnated characters who interact
across a vast tapestry of history in Kim Stanley Robinson’s The
Years of Rice and Salt (2002).
• the multi-bodied, multiply gendered aliens invented by Eleanor
Arnason in her story “Knapsack Poems” (2002).
• and, in a particularly vivid expression of the trope, the daemons
of Philip Pullman’s alternative universe in the His Dark Materials
sequence.

We meet the daemons on the first pages of Pullman’s The Golden

Compass (1995; titled Northern Lights in Britain). They look like pets
but function more like prosthetic extensions of selfhood: separable
organs of the soul in animal form. The protagonist Lyra views her
daemon Pentalaimon as a companion and fellow conspirator.
Because Lyra is still forming as a person, her daemon is protean:
sometimes moth, sometimes bird or cheetah. The alarming Mrs.
Coulter uses hers, a golden monkey, to seduce and spy on others.
Lord Asrael’s daemon is a snow leopard; it reinforces his own
inclination to intimidate others and attract their admiration. Pullman
uses the same leonine imagery to depict both daemon and man: “All
his movements were large and perfectly balanced, like those of a
wild animal, and when he appeared in a room like this, he seemed a
wild animal held in a cage too small for it” (13).
 Pullman’s model for the daemons is the mythic tradition of the
familiar, with just a hint of shape-shifter. He was also inspired, he
says, by the Renaissance fashion of having one’s portrait painted
with an animal prop, like Leonardo da Vinci’s elegantly sinister Lady
with an Ermine (Butler 2007). The daemons express inner truths
about their human counterparts: for instance, servants all have dogs
as daemons. A major part of the plot is an invention that severs
daemon from master, leaving a maimed, witless husk. Human
characters in the series can lie and misrepresent themselves, but
their daemons always testify to an inner truth. This single narrative
device allows Pullman to portray characters with remarkable depth,
as if they were too large and various to be contained in a single
body. It affects everything in the story, from setting to theme, and
carries the reader through a number of less-engaging side plots. It
also tells a truth about human nature: that selfhood extends beyond
a person’s skin and can even invade other living beings.
The converse of that truth is that a single individual can, as Walt
Whitman puts it, “contain multitudes.” Fantastic literature offers
several rationales for positing multiple inner voices or personae. The
Pixar movie Inside Out (2015) is both an instance of the trope and
an examination of its use: a metafiction about popular psychology. It
presents, without explanation, a version of selfhood in which each
emotion or motivation is a different character—voiced by a different
actor—inside the heads of the protagonist, her family, and everyone
she meets (including a cat and dog). In science fiction, as opposed
to fantasy proper, multiple selves are more likely to be accounted for
through some sort of technology or (because science fiction allows
itself certain pseudo-scientific premises) through telepathy or racial
memory or possession.
One of the most rigorously scientific of setups is in Greg Egan’s
ironically titled “Reasons to Be Cheerful” (first published 1997). The
protagonist of that story, Mark, has a brain tumor; the cure for his
condition turns out to attack healthy tissue, necessitating an even
more drastic intervention in the form of prosthetic brain tissue: “an
elaborately tailored polymer foam…that attracted axons and
dendrites from surrounding neurons” (203) to replace the dying
areas. This new artificial brain matter, however, is blank. To give him
back memories and a personality, scientists program the tissue with
neural patterns using “4,000 records from the database” from which
he must select a new, individual self.
At the end of the story, Mark has a revelation. His selfhood may
be a construct, a random selection from among the habits and
desires of strangers, but so is everyone’s. Looking at his father, he
thinks,

he’s there inside my head, and my mother too, and ten million ancestors,
human, proto-human, remote beyond imagining. What difference did 4,000
more make? Everyone had to carve a life out the same legacy: half
universal, half particular; half sharpened by relentless natural selection, half
softened by the freedom of chance. I’d just had to face the details a little
more starkly. (227)

In this conclusion—one of the few genuine “reasons to be cheerful”

in the story—Egan gives a scientific rationale for treating the psyche
as a complex, contradictory, contingent thing. But fantasy offers
other avenues to the same discovery.
Lois McMaster Bujold’s Chalion series, and especially the set of
novellas centered on the character of Penric, uses divine and
demonic possession to account for the presence of more than one
self within the head of a single character. In the world of the series,
the five gods—Father, Mother, Son, Daughter, and trickster Bastard—
can intervene in the affairs of humanity by taking over individuals
temporarily. The possessed person is considered a saint and has
extraordinary powers including the ability to see the true self or
selves inside other persons. The gods are not necessarily benevolent
from a human point of view, following plans beyond our knowing,
and demons are not evil, though they are forces of chaos and
disorder. In Penric’s Demon (2015), a young nobleman inadvertently
invites such a demon into himself when its host dies. Since Penric is
unfamiliar with demons, the reader gets to learn their nature along
with him:
 Demons were supposed to begin as formless, mindless elementals,
fragments escaped or leaked into the world from the Bastard’s hell, a place
of chaotic dissolution.…All the demons possessed of speech or knowledge or
personhood was taken from their successive masters, though whether
copied or stolen, Pen was unclear.

Such knowledge suddenly becomes less abstract as Pen, or Penric,

must learn to assert his own identity against the competing claims of
a demon and as it turns out, its twelve prior hosts. All of those
earlier carriers were female, including a mare and a lioness, as well
as women of many classes and locations. The most recent are
strongly present in Penric’s mind; the oldest rather distantly there,
faded over time.
Though he is in danger of being overwhelmed by this new interior
crowd and especially by the demon itself, it is Penric’s good nature
that gives him the advantage over them. His first impulse is to
engage in conversation rather than inner battle, and he charms the
demon by giving it the first gift it has ever been offered, a name. In
return he receives their respect and, eventually, access to their
considerable and varied knowledge—he can speak and read multiple
languages and use the skills of a physician, a priestess, and a
courtesan. That last presents some difficulties for Pen, as the male
occupant of twelve or thirteen female consciousnesses (since the
demon—now Desdemona—itself has come to identify as feminine).
Penric’s condition can be read metaphorically: as a way of
representing acquired learning, or empathy, or indecision, as in such
phrases as “She was of two minds on the issue.” It can also stand
for bisexuality in two senses of that word: having the nature of, and
also being attracted to, both males and females. It is mythic, in that
demonic possessions and tricksters as well as sudden and dramatic
metamorphoses are common in oral traditional texts. The Norse
trickster god Loki, for instance, changes sex on occasion and even
gives birth, and the Greek seer Tiresias spends seven years as a
female. In those cases, the transformation is physical, whereas
Penric’s is mental, although he does, in a later story, demonstrate
considerable skill in performing as a woman.
 Maria Nikolajeva (1988) has coined a term for what happens to
mythic motifs when they pass out of oral tradition and into literary
narratives. What once were mythemes (their designation in semiotic
terminology) become what Nikolajeva calls fantasemes, irreducible
but replicable chunks of fantastic world-building. According to
Nikolajeva, “sometimes fantasemes coincide with what other
scholars call motifs or functions. More often, however, a fantaseme is
a wider notion…” (23). Examples range from individual enchanted
objects or fantastic creatures such as witches’ familiars to
fundamental rules of magic, such as the principle of true names in
Le Guin’s Earthsea—which would constitute one of Nikolajeva’s
“wider notions.” Most fantasemes originate as mythemes, which is to
say that for any given magical principle or motif, one can find a
version of it in oral tradition, using such tools as Stith Thompson’s
Motif-Index of Folk-Literature (revised 1955–58). Those fantasemes
in turn invite metaphoric readings, as they interact with the
characters and themes of fiction.
But a fantaseme such as Penric’s acquisition of, as he says, “a
council of twelve invisible older sisters” is more than either a mythic
reference or a metaphoric link. It resets his nature as a character
and alters the kind of story he is in. Like distributive selfhood, this
sort of commingling of source identities represents something
significant about Penric and about his world—which is to say, not
only the imagined physical world but also his story-world, the entire
set of possible interactions and implications that Bakhtin calls a
chronotope. The change in Penric is structural, and the kind of
structure it establishes is meaningful as a way of understanding
what it is to be human. Like Mark in “Reasons to Be Cheerful,” Penric
must carve a life out of his legacy, as do we all. If Pullman’s
daemons represent the distributive capacity of the soul, Penric’s
demon represents its ability to merge and commingle. We are
compound beings as well as extended ones.
Fantasy offers many forms of compounded selves, and many
ways to acquire them. Some inner sharers are invited in, as Penric
unknowingly welcomes Desdemona. Others simply barge in, like the
Mockingbird in Sean Stewart’s novel of the same name (1998): a
spirit that invades the protagonist and rides her as spirits of the
dead ride a medium. Others have always been there unnoticed, like
sleeper spies, until roused by trauma or ritual or sexual awakening
as in Alan Garner’s The Owl Service (1967). Severian, protagonist of
Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun (1980–83), acquires a new
second self and a new life trajectory through an act of ritual
cannibalism enhanced by an alien drug and a miracle. In each case,
the multiple selves must negotiate a new blended or kaleidoscopic
identity. When they are able to do so successfully, the compounded
being is stronger, more adaptable, and more self-aware than before.
Distributive and compounded psyches are not the only structures
of selfhood that can be represented through fantasy, nor are
selfhood and transformation the only categories that can be
represented structurally through fantastic devices and narrative
tropes. Anything that has a structure can have that structure set into
magical form. Love has a structure, or rather many structures: Ovid’s
Metamorphoses represent a wide sampling. Death has a structure:
graveyard fantasies such as George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo
(2017) represent that structure spatially, while personifications such
as Terry Pratchett’s Grim Reaper (and the more specialized Death of
Rats) in the Discworld books represent it as a humanlike enemy or
guide. Gender has a structure, as does desire. All major life changes
have structures. Injustice has a structure: a powerful example of the
way fantasy can depict that is Frances Hardinge’s story of genocide
and resistance, Gullstruck Island (2009). Even meaning itself has a
structure, and fantasy offers ways to represent semiosis, or the act
of meaning, in such guises as magical bindings or Earthsea’s True
Speech.
Whether derived from myth or concocted from metaphor,
fantasemes operate within larger systems. Fantasy is more than its
component bits: its motifs take their meaning from the narrative
patterns in which they are embedded. Fantasemes are the
vocabulary of fantasy; stories are individual sentences; both depend
on our knowledge of the syntactic and semantic codes of storytelling
to give them order and meaning.
From just a few hints in a story, we start to hypothesize a world
in which those clues form a coherent whole. The better we know the
genre and its folk sources, the more quickly we can fill in the gaps
and intuit a structure for the story-world. And once we perceive the
“proportion and harmony” of that world, it can serve as a model or
miniature simulation of the world of experience. We come to know
it; we live in it as we read and remember the tale. And because of
the way thought works, through logic and emotional association and
perceived linkages, the fantasy world begins to offer insights into the
world outside the fiction. In effect, it becomes a new source domain
from which to extend metaphors.
To some extent, this is true of fiction in general. Realistic
constructions such as William Faulkner’s Mississippi become
touchstones for readers’ understanding of the world outside the
fiction. Iconic characters like Dickens’s Scrooge or Austen’s too-
proud Mr. Darcy stand in for whole classes of people. Social
interactions we have read about start to show up all around us: the
amusing misunderstandings of romantic comedy or the catastrophic
decisions of tragic heroes.
Michael Saler notes, in As If: Modern Enchantment and the
Literary Prehistory of Virtual Reality (2012), that some of these
fictional worlds are so indelible as to be reusable by other writers:
they become sandboxes in which anyone can play, virtual realities
before virtuality became associated with the digital world.
Significantly, all of his examples verge on, or cross the line into,
fantasy. If we could travel in time, we might expect to see
something like Dickens’s London; but Sherlock Holmes’s London is a
more bizarre, fantastic space. H. P. Lovecraft’s New England is a step
further into the fantastic, with realistic geography but with
impossible forces and alien beings lurking in its caves and attics. At
the far end of the scale is Tolkien’s Middle-earth: wholly separated
from history and inaccessible by any form of transport other than the
imagination. Saler doesn’t include L. Frank Baum’s Oz among his
instances of virtual spaces, though Oz is a perfect illustration of the
process, as inviting to other creators as Lovecraft’s mythos or
Sherlockiana. All of these imagined worlds have inspired numerous
sequels and adaptations and pastiches. Part of their appeal, I would
suggest, is that each imagined world is organized around principles
that are based in experience but that operate with a clarity and
consistency not to be found in any real society. They are magical,
though the magic may be covert, disguised as Holmes’s deductive
reasoning or Moriarty’s malevolence. And magic throws everything
into higher relief: makes the structure of meaning explicit.
The fantastic exerts a pull even on realistic story-worlds. The
more inhabitable of these have been turned into overt fantasy by
later writers. Faulkner’s South is made magical in stories by Manly
Wade Wellman, Terry Bisson, and Andy Duncan. Regency fantasy is
an entire subgenre, turning Austen’s England into a fairy kingdom.
This genre-shift can be read as a sort of Doppler red shift: as the
past recedes into the distance, it gets colored by imagination and
wish-fulfillment. History begins to converge with story. Actual places
—Austen’s Bath or Baker Street in London—start to bilocate,
showing up on maps of both primary and secondary worlds.
Fantasy is known for its use of maps, although Stefan Ekman
points out in Here Be Dragons (2013) that the now obligatory map
preceding chapter one was uncommon before Tolkien popularized
the practice. One of the reasons for such maps is to give the reader
room to exercise the imagination beyond the confines of the story.
Named places to which the characters never go, warnings about
dragons or dangerous forests, and even blank spaces on the map
give the virtual world more depth and credibility. But the most
important function of the map is to provide a sequence for
exploration and for revisiting favorite spaces. To map something out
is to plan an expedition. Maps arrange experiences in time and
space, and thus allow us to organize meanings. An explicit use of
this capacity is the Renaissance practice of creating a memory
palace—a fantaseme that shows up in John Crowley’s Little, Big
(1981) and a number of other fantasy novels.
 In Charles Sanders Peirce’s semiotic theory, maps are icons:
structurally similar to the things they stand for and thus useful
sources of information. A city map tells us things about the city that
we might not learn by walking its streets. A blueprint is a map of the
building constructed from it. The blueprint for Princess Irene’s house
in The Princess and the Goblin might not have markings for “Here
the goblins will tunnel in” or “Attic rooms for the magical Great-
grandmother,” but the spaces are arranged in a way that enables
those discoveries. The blueprint is an icon of the house, and the
house itself becomes an icon of other things: the kingdom,
maturation, the soul.
Just as the Princess’s house models the psyche, the house of
Edgewood in Little, Big stands in for the structure of fantasy itself.
Edgewood is a grand Victorian folly: an architectural game designed
by the founder of the Drinkwater family. John Storm Drinkwater was
both an architect and a spiritualist, and the house he has built
serves as both a sample of his wares and a gateway to other
realities. It is five-sided, and each of its façades is in a different high
Victorian style, festooned with porticoes and dormers and bric-a-
brac. The pentagonal shape leaves the interior full of odd angles and
dead-end corridors: it is a building to get lost in. Like the Tardis on
Doctor Who, it is bigger inside than outside. The grounds of the
house abut a woodland that is home to supernatural as well as more
ordinary wildlife. It is a liminal construction within a liminal space.
Crowley’s story lets us know that Edgewood is both mythic and
metaphoric. The myths range from the story of the sleeping king
Frederic Barbarossa to Mother Goose, absorbing as well a range of
more literary figures or fantasemes such as Lewis Carroll’s Alice. The
metaphors are myriad: Edgewood is the Drinkwater family itself, but
also western civilization, domestic life, prophecy (including the Tarot
deck wielded by Great-Aunt Cloud), memory, history, and art. Emily
Dickinson’s aphorism applies well to it and its neighboring wood:
that “Nature is a Haunted House—but Art—a House that tries to be
haunted” (Dickinson, 1971). Little, Big is unabashedly metafictional,
and one of its messages is that all fantastic tales tend toward
metafiction because they make us aware of their own made-upness,
their artifice.
Above all, Edgewood is storytelling; it is the story we are reading,
and thus a map of fantasy in all its possibilities. But storytelling is
too large and various to be simply a metaphor: it is a realm, in the
sense that Crowley uses that word in another novel, Ka: Dar Oakley
in the Ruin of Ymr (2017). Edgewood fits the definition of realm Ka
by being “Where we are when we are what we are” (76): in this
case, the place we go when we find ourselves in stories. From the
realm of story, one can draw an unlimited supply of metaphors:
every X in the source domain can find a Y in any target domain.
Hence we can go around claiming that X is Y in an attempt to
understand love or violence or the numinous.
One of the essential functions of story is to generate ever more
metaphors, and the metaphors of fantastic storytelling are especially
useful because their artificiality is so transparent. Because fantasy is
not life but lie, it can stand for the mysteries of life, for the hidden
things and the underlying structures. In An Experiment in Criticism
(1961), C. S. Lewis made the important distinction between “realism
of content” and “realism of presentation” (57–9), maintaining that
fantasy can do as well by the latter as any sort of fiction. I would go
a step further and say that in renouncing realism of content, fantasy
gains an ability to map the tectonic plates of reality. As Le Guin says
in her 1974 essay “Why Are Americans Afraid of Dragons,” “fantasy
is true, of course. It isn’t factual, but it’s true.” Though nothing
prevents the fantasy writer from employing the representational
devices of realism—all the facts, Ma’am, but not just the facts—it is
the unreal that opens the way for deeper truths.
 2
Realism and the Structures of
Fantasy
The Family Story

What does realism look like from the vantage point of fantasy? It
might appear surprisingly familiar, like an unknown relative. We tend
to think of realist and fantastic fictions as a contrasting pair, but then
there are many possible counterparts to realism. Fredric Jameson
names a few:

realism vs. romance, realism vs. epic, realism vs. melodrama, realism vs.
idealism, realism vs. naturalism. (bourgeois or critical) realism vs. socialist
realism, realism vs. the oriental tale, and, of course, most frequently
rehearsed of all, realism vs. modernism. (2)

That last binary suggests one problem in formulating an answer to

the question, “What isn’t realism?” If “fantasy” is a vexed term,
“realism” is positively schizophrenic. If the opposite is modernism,
then realism is defined by its historical period. If, however, the
opposite is romance or epic, then it is (assuming that we are talking
about novels), a generic distinction. These are among what Jameson
calls the antinomies of realism: the essential contradictions at its
heart. Above, all, there is the unresolvable paradox that realism is
seen as both description and judgment, or, as Jameson says, it is “an
epistemological claim [that] masquerades as an aesthetic ideal” (5).
Yet, as I said at the beginning, fantasy and realism might be
more closely related than we usually suppose. Samuel R. Delany’s
notion of subjunctivity (outlined in his essay “About 5,750 Words”) is
useful here. Think of a scale from literal truth to complete
fabrication. No fiction, of any subgenre, sits at either end of the
scale. Rather, all are conditionally faithful to experience; all stories lie
to some extent and all testify to some truths. From George Eliot to
George MacDonald is not a long journey but a short excursion down
the road toward greater subjunctivity, or imaginative hypothesizing.
The works of both start out with an “if” that marks them out as
fictions; MacDonald’s fairy tales (he also wrote domestic novels,
which have more in common with his fantasy than one might
expect) push the “if” a little further toward “what if?” or even
“imagine that.” Roland Barthes’s useful phrase “l’effet de réel”
reveals the secret at the heart of realism: we are never seeing reality
but only the effect of the real, the effectively real, that which is real
enough for the purpose. The production of such an effect is a matter
of studied technique, like the style of painting called “trompe l’œil,”
or fool-the-eye.
So I will be exploring realism not only from the viewpoint of a
reader of fantasy but also in the context of children’s literature. As
noted in chapter 8, children’s literature is a protected space, wherein
child characters enact a kind of innocence that belongs not to real
children but to the memories and wishes of adults. Many things have
traditionally been left out of that space to keep it functioning as a
refuge: not only sex and violence but also economics and politics
and cultural and racial outsiders. After the middle of the twentieth
century, those things began to appear in realistic literature for older
children, but they were always there in the forerunner to fantasy, the
oral tale. To become more real, children’s literature first had to
become more like fairy tales while seeming to reject the fantastic
components of such tales.
Elizabeth Enright was a critically acclaimed writer of children’s
books in a genre known as the family story: four books about the
Melendy family, two about an abandoned Victorian resort town called
Gone-Away Lake, and a couple of stand-alone novels, one of which,
Thimble Summer, won the 1939 Newbery Medal. Those were not
her entire output, however; she also wrote sharply observed short
fiction for adults (appearing in The New Yorker and six O. Henry
Prize anthologies), personal and critical essays, and a pair of short
fantasies, Zeee (1965) and Tatsinda (1963). Her fantasies are
competent and charming, somewhat unusual in having been
published before the post-Tolkien fantasy boom, but by no means as
beloved as her realist fiction. The characters aren’t as memorable;
the plots are a little more derivative; and the world-building is
infused with whimsy, from which her other stories stay well clear. I
would suggest that the real problem with her fairy tales is that she
had already written fantasy of a richer, truer sort. Enright’s best
fiction is fantasy in realist guise, and her books and her comments
on them reveal how much closer ordinary fiction is to fantasy than is
usually acknowledged. Read in conjunction with the work of her
contemporary Edward Eager, Enright’s family stories reveal an
affinity to fantasy that says much about how the real and the
magical interact in fiction.
The family story is—or used to be—one of the major strands of
children’s literature along with varieties such as animal tale, school
story, mystery, fantasy adventure, and Künstlerroman (an account of
the development of a someday-artist). These subgenres freely mix
and mutate, so that a foundational text like Louisa May Alcott’s Little
Women can depict both the March family as a whole and Jo as
emerging writer. Peter Rabbit might be read as a family story as well
as a beast fable. Edward Eager’s comic fantasy Half Magic (1954) is
equally the story of four siblings and their mother, thus paying
homage to his acknowledged model Edith Nesbit’s stories of the
Bastable family as well as her magical misadventures. A family story
is an episodic, mostly humorous account of life in a large-ish or
extended family. Each child in the family is given the spotlight at
some point, but the real protagonist is the family as a dynamic
whole: overall plot arcs usually concern the family facing some crisis
as one and reorganizing itself while reaffirming its central values.
Major figures in the development of the form include Alcott, Nesbit,
Arthur Ransome, Carol Ryrie Brink (who combined it with historical
fiction in Caddie Woodlawn, 1935), Eleanor Estes, and writers of
formulaic series such as the Boxcar Family, the Five Little Peppers,
and the Famous Five—respectively, Gertrude Chandler Warner,
Margaret Sidney, and Enid Blyton.
The mention of formula highlights one of the key differences
between the reception of realist and that of fantastic fictions.
Formula is an essential part of fantasy, which has its roots in
traditional forms such as the fairy tale. Oral transmission pushes
stories toward formula, as documented by Milman Parry and Albert
Lord in their studies of classical and modern epic singers. The
presence of formula in oral narrative is not a bug but a feature.
Realist writers, by contrast, are expected to avoid formula—which, in
practice, means disguising it. Their stories are supposed to feel
organic and natural, based in observation and growing out of
characters’ foibles and desires, rather than dictated by some generic
pattern. That is why some creative writing programs still insist that
their students write only “literary” fiction; genre is not allowed.
There are myriad definitions of genre, ranging from marketing
category to Wittgenstein’s “language game,” but whatever one’s
favorite definition, the idea that any text could fail to participate in
some genre or other makes no sense. Genres represent tacit
agreements between writer and reader about what a story is and
how it should be read. As John Rieder says of science fiction, it “is
not a set of texts, but rather a way of using texts and of drawing
relationships among them” (197). Within any given generic contract
are unwritten clauses about what is important for a story and what
can be left out, what constitutes an ending, and how to tell good
writing from bad. Genres are also enabling mechanisms: they
reassure writers that certain kinds of experience are worth reading
about, and they encourage particular ways of organizing those
experiences. In that sense, Southern fiction is as much a genre as
detective fiction, though its generic constraints have more to do with
gothic sensibility, collective guilt, and exuberant style than with
dividing the characters into detectives, suspects, and victims. As
mentioned in the previous chapter, Southern fiction was authorized
by the work of William Faulkner and later Robert Penn Warren and
Eudora Welty, just as the classic mystery was authorized by Edgar
Allan Poe and Agatha Christie. They made the South available for
literature; they showed how to turn its history and tensions into
story. Bret Harte and Owen Wister did the same thing for the West.
Every successful writer similarly authorizes their own form while
remaking the genres they have inherited. A text can be faithful to
experience and still conform to generic expectations. Even
autobiography is a genre, as is, Hayden White tells us, narrative
history itself (83).
The pretense that realist fiction is purely representational and
convention-free leads to peculiar critical judgments, and the family
story form is a particularly revealing example. Surveys such as Carol
Lynch-Brown and Carl M. Tomlinson’s Essentials of Children’s
Literature (1993) equate the family story with realism, and then fault
it for being insufficiently real. Books such as Enright’s and Estes’s,
they say, pale in contrast with Louise Fitzhugh’s 1964 Harriet the
Spy, which opened up the possibility of “a more graphic and
explicitly truthful portrayal of life” (135). The problem with this claim
is not its praise of Harriet but its use of the word “truthful” to
describe something that is merely darker and more satirical, as well
as its assumption that realism must be “graphic.” Similarly, Anne W.
Ellis, in The Family Story in the 1960’s, finds stories of troubled
fictional families somehow more real than those of happy ones, and
laments the fact that “sound material based on real life was
sometimes spoiled in conjunction with impossible adventures” (76).
Phillip Barrish, in American Literary Realism, Critical Theory, and
Intellectual Prestige, 1880–1995, refers to such judgments as
“‘realer-than-thou’ one-upmanship” (4). Corinne Hirsch sums up the
situation within children’s literature similarly:

Courses and textbooks characterize the children’s and young adult novel as
“fantasy” or “realism,” regarding realism as a grab bag of all nonfantasy.
Books are praised for their realism, condemned as unrealistic. Realism
becomes a criterion for good literature, although it is rarely defined when
used in this way.” (9)
As Hirsch suggests, realism can hardly stand as a criterion for
judgment when readers don’t agree on what counts as real, either in
fiction or in life.
One way to avoid such critical misfirings is to accept that realism
and fantasy can coexist in the same text, and that such blended
texts are neither inherently superior nor inferior to stories made up
primarily of one mode or the other. Both C. S. Lewis and J. R. R.
Tolkien took up the question of realism’s place in fantasy, with Lewis,
in his 1961 An Experiment in Criticism formulating the idea of a
“realism of presentation” not dependent on “realism of content” (57–
9). Tolkien went even further in his lecture “On Fairy-stories,”
claiming “That the images are of things not in the primary world…is
a virtue, not a vice. Fantasy (in this sense) is, I think, not a lower
but a high form of Art…” (47).
We are dealing with incommensurables here. More realistic does
not necessarily mean less fantastic, nor the converse. Furthermore,
realism can be executed well or badly, as can fantasy, and a single
text may do both at once magnificently or incompetently. To get
back to examples, I’d like to look at a family story in which a bit of
fantasy is embedded within a predominantly realistic frame and one
in which a realistic text is transformed into a magical episode. The
first is the next-to-last of Enright’s Melendy family books, Then There
Were Five (1944). The second is Eager’s The Time Garden (1958).
In an article about Enright as exemplar of the family story, I
proposed five key components of her novels that are typically found
throughout the subgenre, though any given work may not
demonstrate them all. They are the most common “family
resemblances,” to use Wittgenstein’s term for the markers that allow
us to see groups of instances as a single category, though no one
defining feature may be shared by all members of the category. Here
is my proposed set of features:

1) a family story is a form of domestic comedy.

2) a family story is a bundle of parallel Bildungsromans.
3) the protagonist of a family story is the family as a whole.
 4) each family story is an ethnography of a unique tribal culture.
5) the family story combines a fantasy structure with a realistic
surface (125).

Two of those features are relevant to my argument here. I will

come back to number five, but for now, the significant element is
number two: the presence of multiple Bildungsromans. For three of
the Melendy children, these are Künstlerromans, artist’s
development novels, since their education is primarily training in
observation, empathy, and self-expression, preparing at least three
of them to excel in the arts. The eldest, Mona, is an aspiring (and,
by the third book, working) actress. Rush, the older of the boys, is a
piano prodigy. Randy, the younger girl, dabbles in various arts, such
as dance and painting. Enright says, “In Randy I recognize two of
my long-ago best friends, as well as two of my long-ago best
wishes: to be a dancer and to be an artist” (Introduction viii), an
acknowledgment that also implicitly positions Randy as a stand-in for
the author herself as a writer-in-the-making.
In the scene in question, after a picnic in the woods, Randy is
entertaining the youngest sibling, Oliver, who deserves some
pampering after he falls into a well. Oliver’s trajectory is pretty
clearly aimed toward science rather than the arts. He is modeled
after Enright’s sons, and especially Nicholas Wright Gillham, who
indeed became a distinguished biologist—the chapter “Oliver’s Other
World” in Then There Were Five, depicting young Oliver’s obsession
with insect life, is revisited as a nonfiction sketch about her now
“grown-up geneticist” son in “The Caterpillar Summer” (74). Though
no budding creator himself, Oliver is an excellent audience for
Randy’s inventions. We are not given the full story but instead come
into it in mid-improvisation:

She was a little awed by the story herself, it came and came, like thread off
a spool, and it was a wonderful story, all about an unknown volcano, near
the North Pole, which was so warm that its sides were covered with
flowering forests and warm streams, though it rose in the midst of a glacial
waste of snow and ice. (Enright 1944 (Then), 205)
With Oliver’s encouragement, Randy gives her characters names and
occupations: “Queen Tataspan, King Tagador, and Tatsinda, the
heroine.…Also Tatsinda was a wonderful ice skater.…She used to go
skating on the Arctic Ocean, on skates made of pure gold.”
However, at this point Oliver falls asleep and the story ends
abruptly—only to be continued almost two decades later as a stand-
alone book. The characters still include Tataspan, Tagador, and
Tatsinda, but they are joined by others: Prince Tackatan, a seeress
and magic-worker named Tanda-Nan, and an invading giant named
Johrgong. (That last name offers a bit of a relief from all the Ta-
names of people and Ti- names of animals that Enright uses to set
her fantasy world apart from reality.) We don’t see the title character
ice-skating, but everything else in Tatsinda develops from Randy’s
story, including the veins of gold that attract the giant’s attention
and complicate the plot.
There may be an explanation among Enright’s papers or
correspondence for this unusual bit of intertextuality. I don’t know
why she decided to develop this one incident into a full-blown
narrative. It could be that she was drawing on her own juvenilia,
using and then reusing something she invented in childhood. Or she
might have become intrigued by the unfinished tale and decided to
flesh it out. As indicated above, I don’t think Tatsinda works as well
as Enright’s family stories. The very factors that make it believable
as the invention of an eleven-year-old—repetitive naming patterns,
emphasis on decorative elements such as the gold, simple
characterizations including a too-perfect heroine—make it less
satisfactory as the work of an experienced adult novelist. Enright
does throw in thematic elements that weren’t in Randy’s tale, such
as Tatsinda’s being ostracized because she differs from everyone else
in having brown eyes and golden hair instead of blue eyes and ice-
white hair, and she works out the invasion plot neatly, using the folk
motif (also found in The Hobbit) of trolls being vulnerable to
sunlight. Tatsinda demonstrates Enright’s craftsmanship at the level
of sentences and descriptive passages. It fits into a tradition of
playful literary fairy tales, such as George MacDonald’s The Light
Princess (1864) and James Thurber’s The White Deer (1945). Yet I
think the main interest in the book is the light it casts on Enright’s
other work.
The scene in Then There Were Five shifts, once Oliver has fallen
asleep, to the artistic ambitions of his siblings. Randy, who has, up
to this point, envisioned other careers, thinks to herself, “Maybe I
better be a writer too.” This thought confirms Randy as Enright’s
textual stand-in. She is the Jo March of the Melendy books: the
budding writer destined to write the story we are reading.
The comparison to Louisa May Alcott is not accidental: Little
Women is an authorizing text for Enright’s family stories. In her 1967
essay on “Realism in Children’s Literature,” Enright cites Alcott as the
starting point of a new, more naturalistic body of fiction for children:
“Then in our grandmothers’ day there came Louisa May Alcott, that
sensible revolutionary who opened the windows in all the
overshuttered, overgimcracked, overplushed houses of children’s
literature. The boisterous air of life came in” (67). Like Alcott’s March
family, the Melendys number four, each clearly delineated and each
with interests that shape the family’s destiny. Like the March sisters,
the Melendys squabble and snipe at one another, but the love that
links them is constant. Both families delight in performance,
rehearsing and performing theatricals in an attic space that is their
own territory. Particular incidents in the Melendy books mirror those
in Little Women: little vanities and come-uppances, comic
misunderstandings, and the sacrifices the children make for a larger
good (the backdrop of the Melendy books is World War II, as that
for Little Women is the Civil War). Oliver’s fall into the well echoes
Amy March’s fall through the ice, and Randy, though not directly
responsible as Jo is, feels the same guilt:

She was never much good in a crisis, and this time all the mean things she
had ever done to Oliver came back to her. The times she had said, ‘No, you
can’t come with us, you’re too little. The times she had put things over on
him, played tricks, laughed behind his back, because he was too young to
know the difference. (203)
The temptation is to read Little Women as a simple record of Louisa
Alcott’s own upbringing, and there are plenty of autobiographical
elements in the book to support such a reading. Yet the novel is not
a memoir and the telling is not simple.
Nor is Randy Melendy’s story a transcription of Elizabeth Enright’s
childhood. For one thing, Enright was an only child, daughter of two
preoccupied artists who eventually divorced. To fill in her fictional
family, she drafted school acquaintances and cousins to form her
imagined quartet of siblings. As she said in an introduction to the
omnibus volume of the first three Melendy books, “It must be
admitted that such a family, made of flesh and blood, whom one
could touch, talk to, argue with, and invite to parties, does not
actually exist. Yet in other ways…each of these people is at least
partly real” (vii). Since her schoolmates were children of other
artists, and her extended family included her uncle Frank Lloyd
Wright, she had plenty of strong-willed and creative types to draw
on. Rush, for instance, was modeled on Ira Glackens, son of the
painter William Glackens. Ira, “the brother of my choice,” shows up,
instantly recognizable from his Melendy doppelganger, in a New
Yorker sketch called “The Shush Rush” (21). She describes Mona as
a composite of school friends and an unnamed favorite cousin who is
perhaps the actress Anne Baxter (1944, viii). Oliver, as mentioned
above, was based on one of her sons, and shared his name with
another. In other words, the Melendy household was a fantasy in the
non-genre sense: the kind of family Enright might like to have grown
up in. In generic terms, though, she stuck strictly to the terms of
realist fiction—or at least to the letter of the contract. A closer look
at the structure of the adventures in the Melendy books and the
later Gone-Away stories suggests a more complex negotiation at
work between fantasy and realism. To get to that, I will turn to
another writer who shared much of Enright’s literary lineage.
Enright’s contemporary Edward Eager made no secret of which
writers authorized his children’s stories. Every one of his books
includes a discussion of E. Nesbit’s fantasies, and L. Frank Baum is
mentioned almost as frequently. Eager considered it a duty to point
Another random document with
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KIVILINTAN HEITTÄJÄT.

Kivilintan heittäminen oli ennen vanhaan nuorten miesten mieluista

urheilutyötä. Aivan harvat kuitenkin tällä alalla mainetta saavuttivat.
Neljää miestä tällä alalla on erikoisesti mainittu.

Aato Tolonen, vanhan sotilaan Matti Tolosen poika, heitti

Honkivaaralla asuessaan kivilintalla Honkivaaran ylimmän talon
portilta alimmaiseen taloon päin, mikä lenti ja tarttui alimmaisen talon
kartanoladon seinään. Otaksutaan että jos kivi esteettömästi olisi
saanut lentää, olisi se vielä liitänyt vähintään 50 metriä. Kivellä Aaton
heittämällä oli siis noin 300 metrin kantovoima. Aato Tolonen kuoli
Pyhännän Sipilässä 1900-luvulla.

Juho Antinp. Heikkinen, nykyinen Rautakyläläisten

Pyhännänkosken mylläri, oli nuorena miehenä samoin kova
kivenheittäjä. Juhon suurimmat ennätykset ovat sattuneet
kirkonkylässä. Kerran heitti Juho kivellä pappilan riihen edestä yli
kellotapulin ristin. Riihen edestä tapulin juurelle on 130 metriä
vastamaata ja itse kellotapuli 15 vanhaa syltä korkea. Samoin heitti
Juho kellotapulin edustalta kahden markan rahalla vedonlyönnin
jälkeen, minkä piti lentää pappilan kartanolle. Kaksimarkkanen
Johon viskaamana lenti tämän matkan, ja voitti Juho vedon, joka oli
kaksi markkaa.

Penna Keränen. Tuliniemestä, ja Taavetti Keränen, Putkolasta,

olivat niinikään viidesti viisi talvisisina navakoita kiven heittäjiä.
Nämä molemmat viskasivat kivilintalla yli Putkonsalmen, joka
monelta muulta siihen aikaan jäi tekemättä. — Putkonsalmen leveys
ei tämän kirjoittajalle ole metreissä tarkalleen tiedossa, mutta siinä
200—300 metrin seutuvilla se kai on. — Penna Keränen kuoli
Tuliniemen tilalla v. 1911 ja Taavetti Keränen Mieslahdella
aikaisemmin.
HEIKKI NORPPANEN.

Kemppainen hän kirkonkirjojen mukaan oli, vieläpä Pyhännän

Eskolan ikivanhaa sukua. Oulumatkallaan kerran sitten oli itse
itsensä nimittänyt Norppaseksi ja sai sitä nimeä sitten kantaa
kuolemaansa asti.

Tähän Norppas-nimeen liittyy äärettömän paljon monenvärisiä

juttuja, joiden päähenkilönä Norppanen on ollut. Oulumatkoilla teki
Norppanen suurimmat kepposensa. Siellä kun oltiin tuntemattomien
ihmisten parissa. Näitä Norppasen lystikkäitä tekoja on pitkä sarja,
muisteltu ihmeenä monessa pitäjässä. Mainitsen tässä muutamia
niistä.

Heikki Norppanen oli ahkera tervansoutaja Ouluun. Tältä

tervansoutumatkalta on kerrottu yhtä ja toista merkillistä. Kerrankin
kun vietettiin sunnuntaita Vakliini-nimisessä porvarissa, päätettiin
keittää useamman venekunnan kosken yhteinen ryynipuuro.
Norppanen mielihyvällä lupasi toimittaa tämän tehtävän sillä aikaa
kun toiset käyvät kirkossa. Lieneekö se nyt puuro ennen toisten
kirkosta tuloa joutunut syötäväksi vai ei, mutta Norppanen
rohkeuttaan näyttääkseen menee kaikissa tapauksissa papin
parhaaltaan saarnatessa kirkon sisäpuolelle, sanoen kuuluvalla
äänellä: "Vakliinin nuijamiehet kaikki puurolle."

Sanottiinpa kerran kadulla kuvernööriä vastaan sattuessa

Norppasen ottaneen käteensä kuvernöörin takin helman ja
lonkkaansa kohauttaen siihen karauttaneen, sanoen: "Isä ennen
pelotteli että et ikipäivinä saa verkaan päästää, vaan nyt minä sain."
Tästä rumasta teosta joutui Norppanen kiini, mutta toisten
tervamiesten todistuksella, että tämä mies ei ole täysiälyinen,
päästettiin vapaaksi.

Eräästä toisesta pahanteosta kiini tavoteltaessa juoksi Norppanen

muutaman tuntemansa keittiöpalvelijan luo ja piilotti itsensä
vaatekaappiin. Takaa-ajaja tulee heti perässä ja kysyy palvelijalta,
onko täällä näkynyt Norppasta. Palvelija omasta puolestaan olisi
vastannut kieltävästi, mutta Norppasen seikkailijaluonne ei anna olla
piilossa. Hän itse avaa kaapin oven ja etsijälle ilmoittaa: "Täällä minä
olen."

Koko Oulu- ja Muhosjokivarsilla asuville taloille oli Norppanen

siihen aikaan tunnettu. Kepposet useinkaan eivät jääneet pieneksi
pilanteoksi, vaan päinvastoin ilmeiseksi pahanteoksi, joista
Norppanen toisinaan pääsi livistämällä, mutta joita joskus sai
sovittaa rahallakin.

Niinpä sanotaan kerran Norppasen repineen verkkoja uhmaten:

"Hirii — riksi ja syli!" Tämä lysti oli tullut kalliiksi.

Kerran oli Norppanen vierittänyt joen rannalla muuripadan jokeen,

nostanut sisään vasikan ja pannut solumaan virran mukana koskelle.
Alaalta tulevilta tervamiehiltä oli sitten viisastellen kysynyt, ovatko he
nähneet itselaskevata matkamiestä.
 Kaiketi paljon pahaa Norppanen kerrankin oli paluumatkallaan
tehnyt, kun kruunun palvelija oli takaa-ajanut ja Muhosperässä
saavuttanut Norppasen matkueen. Norppanen tällöinkin pahaa
aavistaen oli kätkeytynyt veneeseen purjeen alle, säkkien lomaan.
Kruunun palvelija ei voinut esittää nimeä kuka pahantekijä on, vaan
Norppasen ulkomuodon kyllä. Ja kun tällaista matkueessa ei
näkynyt, alkoi epäillä oliko mies veneeseen piilottautunut. Silläpä
juuri kysyy muutaman veneen sisällystä, jota epäili että mitä siinä on.
Toiset vastasivat rohkeina että siinä on säkki siemenrukiita. Toinen
vielä lisää: "Onkin hyviä siemenrukiita. Poskimäkeen näillä
siemenillä on ennen jo kylvetty ja hyvästi ovat itäneet." — Tätä
puhetta ei Norppanen jaksanut, kuulla, sillä Norppaselle oli
Poskimäen tyttö tehnyt jalkalapsen. Norppanen nousee ylös veneen
pohjalta ja sanoo että jos tämä matkue on tehnyt pahaa, niin kyllä
miehet nimellään vastaavat tekonsa, joten kirjoitettakoon muistiin
kaikki nämä miehet. Pahantekijän etsijä tähän suostui. "Mikä on
sinun nimesi?" "Minä olen Heikki Norppanen." Toiset kyllä tiesivät
että Heikki Kemppainen se on, vaan eivät oikaisseet. "Entäpä nämä
toiset?" Moni toisista olisi nyt ilmoittanut oikean nimensä, vaan
Norppanen ehätti väliin: "Näin tärkeässä asiassa ei saa valehdella,
vaan on ilmoitettava oikea nimi." Ja jokaiselle toverilleen keksi
Norppanen samassa väärän nimen, jotka kirjoitettiin muistiin. Tämän
jälkeen saivat matkamiehet mennä. — Sanotaan Hyrynsalmen
nimismiehelle sitten tulleen nimiluettelon näistä epäiltävistä
henkilöistä, mutta Ristijärvellä ei nimiä tunnettu. Asia raukesi siihen.

Kerran keväällä oli Norppanen mennyt, tukkisavottaan uittotöihin.

Nuoret miehet olivat siellä hippailleet uusissa kengissä ja
Norppasella oli vaan vanhat talvikengän rehkoset. Sitten yöllä
kaikkien nukkuessa leikkeli Norppanen puukolla ensin omistaan ja
sitten toisten uusista pieksuista nokat poikki ja asetti pirtin pöydän
laidalle nököttämään. Avonokkaiset taas asetti orren päälle
paikalleen. Kun sitten aamulla tulee kenkien jalkaan-pano, rupeaa
kuulumaan kipeitä kiroja kengän silpomisesta. Norppanenkin on
heräävinhän ja ikäänkuin yhtyy meluun: "Eivätkö sitten ole minunkin
kengistäni leikanneet!" Sitten kirous ja uhka että jos tietäisi kuka on
leikannut niin —.

Sanotaanpa kerran isänsä kotona Eskolassa Norppasen

kokeilleen paljonko tervaaminen jatkaa kengän ikää. Toista
kenkäänsä oli tervannut ja toista ei ollenkaan. Yhden päivän
enemmän oli tervattu kenkä kestänyt. Kerran taas oli päivän pitänyt
uusia kenkiä, toisen päivän aamulla ne punontaisella paikannut ja
illalla leikannut, terät varsista pois arvellen: "Toisen moin sitä näkyy
kenkää paikaten pitävän."

Norppanen oli suutari, teki myöskin anturakenkiä.

Norppanen kuoli harmaapäisenä vanhuksena poikansa luona

Väliahon torpassa Eskolan pellonpäässä Pyhännän kylässä 1890-
luvulla.

Isä ja äiti kertoivat näkemiään Norppasen kuolinhetkistä. He juuri

silloin olivat atimamatkalta paluussa Hiisijärveltä. Norppanen oli ollut
tunnotonna ja valittanut: "Elkää sitoko niin lujalle, heittäkää toki
helpommalle." Samalla vuorokaudella sitten kuoli. — Äiti arveli että
Norppanen sielunsa silmillä näki huutaessaan ne pahat enkelit jotka
tulivat häntä noutamaan. Siitä johtui tuo surkea valitus. Olipa sitä
mieltä, että Norppasen olotila kuoleman jälkeen pahain tekoinsa
tähden tulisi tavallista hirmuisemmaksi.
RIKOLLISUUTTA.

Kaikkina aikoina on Ristijärvi ollut suurista tapahtumista köyhä.

Sellaiset kuin murhat ovat aivan tuntemattomat. Että joku on
erehtynyt tekemään aina isättömän lapsen, on paikkakunnalla
pidetty jo ihmeistä suurimpana. Nämä isättömien lapsien synnyttäjät
ovat taas kärsivällisesti kuormansa kantaneet, ylenkatseen ja vaivat
syykseen lukeneet.

Yhden ainoan kerran on sattunut tapaus, että synnyttämisen

jälkeen kuollut lapsi oli salattu. Tällaisen teon tekijäksi huomattiin
eräs leskeksi joutunut talonemäntä Jokikylästä. Linnalla teko
kuitattiin.

Aivan harvinaisia, joskaan ei esiintymättömiä, ovat olleet

itsemurhat. Onpa todennettu kuitenkin, että tällaiset teot ovat tehdyt
aina mielenhäiriössä. Lopettihan päivänsä tuppivyöhönsä
hirttäytymällä Kalle-Jaakko niminen mies Sepäntalon veljeksistä v.
1896. Muutamia vuosia aikaisemmin ampui itsensä Kalle
Kemppainen Mustavaaran Kunnaalta. Hän oli yksi niistä monista
Hyrynsalmen Kypärän veljeksistä, joita yksi oli Sotkamon Sipisillä ja
neljä muuta Ristijärvellä. Tämäkin tapaus oli tiettävästi
mielisairauden aiheuttama. Samoin muutamia vuosia myöhemmin
hirtti itsensä neuloja Juho Kinnunen Kinnulan heinälatoon
Pyhännänmäen rinteellä. Juho oli mökkisillä Paasoniemessä
Pienenpyhännän rannalla. Eukon kuolema vaikutti häneen niin
kovasti että harkitsi parhaaksi itsekin muuttaa tuonen tuville. —
Kinnunen jätti jälkeensä vaan kaksi ala-ikäistä lasta. Kemppainen
taas useampia. Kemppaisen mielisairauden syynä juoruttiin olleen
erään eukon taikomisen päästä avioyhteyteen, molemmat kun olivat
leskiä. Ei tepsinyt Tällaiset itsemurhan tehneet haudattiin n.s.
hiljaisella hautauksella. Ne vietiin suoraan hautausmaalle ja
kuopattiin multaan. Pappi sitten aikojaan myöten kävi haudalla
lukemassa lyhyen kaavan mukaisen hautalukujakson. Yleinen
mielipide taas oli, että itsemurhan tehneiden sieluilla ei ole osaa
tulevan elämän iloista.

Että joku toiselta ottaisi pois hengen, on Ristijärvellä aina ollut

tuntematon asia. Läheltä se kuitenkin piti Hietavaaralla lokakuussa v.
1896. Siinä vietettiin silloin talontytön ratuloita. Monista päihtyneistä
Kalle Heikinpoika Kurkinen, ent. Tuohilehdon veljeksiä, osottautui
silloin toisia julmemmaksi. Hän ilman erityistä syytä löi iltapäivällä
Tuohilehdon Pertun rintakehän puhki terävällä tuppipuukollaan.
Mutta vaikka haava oli hengenvaarallinen, Perttu monta viikkoa
sairastettuaan tointui elämään. Kalle taas tuomittiin 1 1/2 vuodeksi
kuritushuoneeseen ja kuoli sinne.

Tappelut ja muut selkään sutkimiset ne taas ovat perin harvinaisia.

Eipä usein satu sitäkään, että toinen toista haukkuisi ja soimauksella
loukkaisi. On kyllä todistettua, että kaikki rumat teot tehdään useinkin
juovuspäissään. Kyllähän sentään Ristijärvelläkin kaikkina aikoina on
hienosittain ryypätty, vaan tottapa se on tullut ja koitunut ylipäätään
terveydeksi.
 Mainitaan vielä että eräs Anni Tuohinen Kirkonkylässä olisi
lapsipuolensa hukuttanut vesitynnyriin pirtissä. Sitten lähtenyt
kylästä apua noutamaan, sanoen siellä: "Kuu minä lähin juosta
rökentämään, niin turskutus kuului." Teko lienee jäänyt
rankaisematta.
KÖYHÄIN HOITO.

Tämän kirjoittajan muistiin on jäänyt kuva vanhasta ruotilais- ja

kerjäläisjärjestelmästä.

Sehän oli siten, että kunakin vuotena toimitettiin n.s. ruotitasaus.

Tehtiin luettelo kaikista kunnan köyhistä, erotellen ne sitten kahteen
sarjaan: ruotilaisiin ja kerjäläisiin. Kerjäläiset taas edelleen kahteen
osaan: kylän ja ympäri koko kunnan kiertolaisiin. Ruotilaisiksi
sijoitettavat olivat etupäässä vanhat ja vaivaiset, eivät enää kyenneet
kylän kierrolle, sekä suuriperheisten köyhien lapset. Aikoja ennen oli
jo määritelty kuinka monta kuukautta kunkin talon oli elätettävä
ruotilaista ja kuinka monta ruokaveroa kerrallaan annettava
kerjäläiselle. Kerjäläisille piti antaa vielä talvella hevoskyyti talosta
toiseen. Kun kunakin vuotena tuli muutoksia ruotilaisjärjestykseen,
niin että joka talo sai uuden j.n.e., luettiin kirkossa kunnallisten,
ilmoitusten joukossa koko ruotilista, jotta asianomaiset saavat siitä
kuulla miten "tasauksessa" on päätetty.

Kyliin kiertolaisiksi asetettiin ne köyhät lesket, jotka eivät

ruotilaisiksi sopineet ja ympäri koko kunnan kiertolaisiksi sellaiset,
joiden ei erityisesti yhden kylän kohdalle katsottu kuuluvan.
Etupäässä äidit, jotka isättömän lapsen kanssa olivat sortuneet
köyhäin kirjoihin, pantiin kiertämään koko kunnan ympäri. Koko
kunnan ympäri sai myöskin mennä joku isällinen perhe, joka kylän
varaan turvautui, sillä sen monilukuisuutensa vuoksi useinkin
katsottiin liiaksi yhtä kylää rasittavan. Ja onhan sitäpaitsi Ristijärven
kunta aina kuulunut yhteen vaivaishoitopiiriin.

Sattui sittenkin henkilöitä, joita ei voitu asettaa ruotilaisiksi

enempää kuin kerjäläisiksikään. Ne olivat sellaisia raajarikkoja, jotka
omin neuvoin eivät kyenneet liikkumaan. Näitä tällaisia jo
ruotilaisjärjestelmiin aikana asetettiin n.s. huutolaisiksi. Vähimmän
vaativille ne joutuivat rahallista korvausta vastaan.

Myöhemmin kuntakokouksen yhteisellä päätöksellä kumottiin koko

ruotilais- ja kerjäläisjärjestelmä. Sijalle tuli rahallahoito-järjestelmä ja
muu tilapäinen avustus. Muutamat hyvin paljon epäilivät tämän
uuden järjestelmiin mahdollisuutta, siksi että se nielee rahallista
rahaa liian paljon. Se on kyllä totta, vaan totta on sekin, että
ruotilaisjärjestelmän aikansa eläneenä oli astuttava syrjään.

Tuskinpa milloinkaan vaivaishoitoa voitanee järjestää itseänsä

kannattavaksi.
NÄLKÄVUODET.

Vuoden 1867 kato oli niin täydellinen, että talvella 1868 kurjuuden
kuva kasvoi suureksi ja saattoi monen köyhän ennenaikojaiseen
hautaan. Hätäaputoimet olivat silloin heikot, kunnanhallitus avuton ja
valtion auttava käsi peräti lyhyt. Talosta taloon, kylästä kylään kulki
nuoria, työhön pystyviä miehiä vailla työtä ja ruokaa. Työtä olisi ollut,
vaan ruokaa ei. Joka talossa oli sekoitettu leipään olkijauhoja,
toisissa niin paljon, että täytyi leipä leipoessa kyhätä puuvanteen
sisään. Taikina oli niin haurasta kuin ruumen ape. Tällaistakaan
leipää ei ollut varaa vieraalle tarjota, sillä oman perheen elatuksessa
kaikilla oli tarpeeksi huolta.

Kun talvella oli kurjuus ja hätä suurimmillaan, saatiin valtion

toimesta kaksi turvakotia nälkäisille, toinen Jokikylän Ritoniemelle ja
toinen kirkonkylän Kariniemeen. Näitä turvakoteja silloiset ihmiset
nimittivät hotelleiksi. Jälestäkin on puhuttu siitä nälkätalvesta
hotellitalvena. Ja kyllä se tuntiin olleen moinen hotelli.

Tänne hotelliin menivät toiset vapaasta tahdostaan, toiset reki-

kyydissä kulkevat vietiin, jos eivät olisi tahtoneetkaan.
 Täällä hotellikomennossa oli kuollut köyhiä laumottain. Huono
ravinto ja vaillinainen sairashoito vei hengen, vaikka paljon silloiset
ihmiset olivat tottuneet kestämään. Lieneekö hotellissa edes lapsille
selvää leipää annettu. Täysikasvuisille ainakin oli sielläkin
sekaleipää.

Hotelliin kuolleille ei sanota olleen varaa tehdä laudoista arkkua

ruumiin ympärille. Arkun asemesta käytettiin päreistä yhteen
nidottuja liisteitä, jotka pyöreäksi tupeksi käärittiin ruumiin ympärille.
Näitä ruumisliisteitä hotellissa rakenteli ne miespuoliset köyhät, jotka
vielä kynnelle kykenivät.

Samana talvena oli muutamia nuoria miehiä, jotka nälkäänsä

sammuttaakseen olivat varastaneet leipää. Nämä vietiin kunnan
miehille rangaistavaksi. Kunnanherrat sitoivat rikoksentekijän käsistä
ja jaloista pirtin rahiin ja löivät selkään niin paljon kuin halusivat. Että
tällainen rikoksellinen olisi saatettu laillisen tuomioistuimen eteen, ei
tullut kysymykseenkään. Olihan kotikuri tarpeeksi mutkaton ja suora
ilman rahallisia kustannuksia.

Sanotaan tapaukseksi kuolleen jonkun tielle heinätukko suuhun.

V. 1891 katsoi Ristijärven kunta syytä olevan ryhtyä hankkimaan

valtion lainaa syöntiviljan ostoa varten. Sellainen saatiin. Sen, joka
tahtoi tällaisen lainan ottaa, piti käydä Oulusta omalla hevosellaan
noutamassa. Sekaleipä tähän aikaan oli jo aivan harvinaista, mutta
lienee sitä muutamissa taloissa vielä koetettu.

Vuodet 1892—1893 olivat edellistä pahemmat. Jo hyvissä ajoin

suunniteltiin laina-anomuksia syöntiviljan ostoa varten, perustettiin
paikallinen hätäaputoimikunta j.n.e. Kaupanhoitaja Tuomas
Härkönen sai tuon epäkiitollisen esimiehen toimen.
 Turvakoti lapsille oli järjestetty Tenämänmäkeen, toinen poikia
varten Pyhännän Eskolaan. Molempien turvakotien hoitajat oli
keskushätäaputoimikunta lähettänyt muualta.

Poikain turvakodissa Eskolassa opetettiin pojille käsityötaitoa,

Mäntyhaloista syrjäsyylleen kiskottiin hienoja päreitä, punottiin ne
säikeiksi ja kudottiin sellaisiksi ropposiksi. Käsilaukun nimeä nämä
parhaiten lienevät kantaneet. Silloin ja vieläpä jälkeenpäin on tätä
poikain oppipaikkaa nimitetty kopsakouluksi. Toiset nimittivät taas
vellikouluksi. Siellä nimittäin oli keitetty jauhovelliä, joka voilla
maustettiin. Sellaista ei ennen oltu nähty.

Muitakin toimenpiteitä nälänhädän poistumiseksi oli järjestetty.

Miehet saivat tehdä käsitöitä, valmistella puukaluja ja eukot kehrätä
hamppuja. Samoin oli monella eri suolla kanavan-kaivua. Likosuo ja
Kariniemensuo kirkonkylässä, Seipisuo, Säkkilänsuo ja Leinolansuo
Jokikylässä saivat tällöin viemäriojan. Yksinpä viemäriojaa
kaivattamaan oli keskushätäaputoimikunta lähettänyt miehiä, jotka
kuitenkaan ojankaivuun nähden eivät olleet paikkakunnan miehiä
viisaammat.

Ojankaivusta ja käsitöistä maksettiin palkka jauhoina. Jauhoja oli

kolmea lajia, nim. ruis-, maisi- ja lisei-jauhoja. Nämä lisei- ja maisi-
jauhot olivat tarkotetut leipään olen ja petäjänkuoren asemesta.

Tämän kirjoittaja oli itse ojaa jauhopalkalla kaivamassa Likosuolla,

Säkkilän-suulla ja Leinolansuolla. Noin 2:50 p. arvosta annettiin
työpäiviin osalle jauhoja. Huonommat kaivajat saivat vähemmän. He
pyytelivät rotevampia hiljentämään vauhtia, sillä he tiesivät
seurauksen, mutta omanvoiton pyyntö tästä huolimatta pääsi
määrääjäksi.
 Työhön kykenemättömät köyhät saivat lahjaksi vanhoja vaatteita ja
jauhoja. Näiden jakaminen tuotti kuitenkin vaikeuksin ja harmia.
Jokainen lahjansaaja luuli toisen saaneen enemmän ja parempia.
Moitteet, viha ja kiukku kohdistuivat pääasiassa esimieheen Tuomas
Härköseen. Moni eukko oli Härkösen edessä purkanut kiukkunsa
pohjaa myöten, jolloin sanoja ei valittu. Tällaisissa tapauksissa
nimittivät kiukuttelijat Härköstä mieluimmin Verkko-Tuomaaksi,
tarkoituksella saada edes näin kostaa. Tuomas Härkönen näet oli
nuorempana paljon verkonkudonta-töissä ja silloin kyllä sanottiin
kaikella kunnialla Verkko-Tuomaaksi.

Kymmenen vuotta myöhemmin, siis 1902—1903, uusiutuu sama

näytelmä, sillä nytkin ovat tulleet katovuodet. Hätäaputoimikunnan
puheenjohtajan ja jauhojen jakajan epäkiitollinen tehtävä annetaan
tällöin kunnallislautakunnan esimies Antti Oikariselle Putkolasta.

Nyt ei kaiveta kanavia suolle, mutta miehet saavat kotonaan tehdä

puuesineitä ja naiset kehräävät taaskin lankoja. Palkka maksettiin
jauhoina. Hätääntyneemmät perheet saavat jauhoja sekä vaatteita
ilmaiseksi. Näin saadut käsityöt myydään myöhemmin huutokaupalla
ja tappio tilitetään keskushätäaputoimikunnalle eroituksena.

Talvella 1903 järjestetään keskushätäaputoimikunnan toimesta

Ristijärven kirkonkylän Aholaan turvakoti köyhiä lapsia varten.
Turvakodin hoitajaksi tuli Helsingistä kaksi neitiä, Hilma Juntunen ja
Hilja Pekurinen. Edellinen piti huolen lasten vaatetuksesta ja
ravinnosta ja jälkimäinen opetuksesta. Ylimäinen pirtti Aholassa oli
ruokailupaikkana ja alempi asuntona. Kolmaskin neiti liittyi tähän
laupeuden työhön. Hänen nimensä oli Vegelius ja piti hän huolen
sairasten hoidosta. Sikäli kun neiti Vegeliusta tultiin tuntemaan,
käytiin häneltä kysymässä neuvoa ja lääkkeitä sairaustapauksissa.
Niinpä ei kuolevaisuus tänä vuonna ollut tavallista suurempi.

Monet köyhät, jotka näiden laupeuden-sisarten kanssa olivat

tekemisissä, kunnioittivat vilpittömin mielin heitä. Mutta oli taas
niitäkin, jotka avunsaantiinsa tyytymättöminä parjasivat ja vasten
naamaakin olivat käyneet rähisemässä. Tämä piirre muuten johtuu
yksinkertaisesti ihmisten tökeryydestä, juuri siitä, kun ei osaa
ansioita arvostella ja vieläpä siksi, että ei tahdota pitää huolta
naapurin menestyksestä.

Neiti Vegelius oli Ristijärvellä vaan yhden talven. Neidit Juntunen

ja Pekuri taas kaksi talvea ja kesän. Kesän ja jälkimäisen talven työ
heillä oli Martta-yhdistyksen toimesta. Kesällä he opettivat
kyökkikasveja kasvattamaan, marjoista sekä sienistä ruokaa
valmistamaan. Olipa syksyllä juurikasvinäyttely, jossa Kokkolan
Jussin suuri turnes näytteli pääosaa ja palkittiin 10 markan
palkinnolla. Pienin palkinto oli 3 mkaa. Tämä oli laatuaan ensimäinen
toimenpide Ristijärvellä juurikasviviljelyksen harrastuksen hyväksi.

Keskushätäaputoimikunnan toimesta keväällä 1903 tuli

Ristijärvelle agronoomi Aksel Hahl (Hanola) sekä kuokkia, lapioita,
suokirveitä ja ruisjauhoja. Agronoomi Hahl ensin kierteli kunnan
kaikki kylät ympäri, neuvotellen torpparien ja koturieläjien kanssa
alkuunpantavasta suoviljelyksestä. Yhdelläkään näistä tähän asti ei
vielä ollut yhtään metriä kaivettu suolle ojaa, eikä liene ollut
aikomuskaan. Agronoomi Hanolan taikasana suoviljelyksen
ojentamiseksi oli ruisjauhot. Niinpä Marttayhdistyksen neidit
Juntunen ja Pekuri kutsuvatkin Hanolaa Jauho-sedäksi.

Viljelysyrittäjä sai ensin osoituksen, mihin kohtaan on paras ruveta

viljelemään. Tämän jälkeen sai mennä Kariniemestä noutamaan
jauhoja. Jauhojen hinta merkittiin velkakirjaan, jossa oli määräys,
että toinen puoli lainasummasta kuolee, jos uutterasti tekee työtä
suolla. Ja tästä puolesta kuolee vielä puoli, jos niskoittelematta
suostuu sen muutamien vuosien kuluttua maksamaan. Siis varsin
edullisia lainoja. Nimikin oli näillä palkkiolainat. Kuukauden perästä
oli aina tehtyjen töiden tarkastus ja uusien lainaerien anto. Moni
mökkiläinen olisi toivonut lainain annon kestävän useampia vuosia,
mutta se loppui jo samana syksynä. Tämän kirjoittaja oli mukana
tässäkin lainaushommassa ja kaivoi ensimäiset ojat suolle.

Kun näitä lainoja alettiin periä takaisin, oli monta sellaista, joilta ei
voinut köyhyyden tähden ollenkaan periä. Toiset taas, joilla olisi ollut
varoja, niskoittelivat sillä syyllä, että varat olivat lahjaksi saatuja
hätäapuvaroja. Tunnustettuun velkakirjaan nähden tämä selitys ei
lain edessä olisi ollut tyydyttävä. Silläpä kunnallislautakunta arvioi
keneltä lainat, vaikeuksia saattamatta velalliselle, voisi periä. Nämä
maksoivat sitten ja keskushätäaputoimikunta oli saanut pienen
prosentin takaisin siitä, mitä oli Ristijärven kunnan osalle uhrannut.

Se suunta, mitä palkkiolainahommalla tarkoitettiin, oli kylläkin

oikeaan osattu. Tämän toimenpiteen kautta päästiin
suoviljelysmakuun. tultiin näkemään, että oikea niitty saadaan
notkelmiin ja märille maille ojittamalla ja kuokkimalla ja myöskin se,
että tänne tehty työ kannattaa ja on aivan elinehto.

Omavaraiset tilalliset ovat pienten esimerkeistä ottaneet oppia ja

alkaneet kokeilla suoviljelystä. Tähänkin nähden palkkiolainoilla on
ollut kauvas kantava merkitys.
KANSAKOULU.

Ristijärven kunta koko laajassa kihlakunnassa oli itsepäisesti aikonut

olla perustamatta kansakoulua, huolimatta siitä, että läänin
kuvernööri useilla kiertokirjeillä siihen kehoitti. Kiertokirjeen johdosta
voitiin kyllä asiasta kuntakokouksessa keskustella, mutta aina
hylkäävällä päätöksellä. Syyksi esitettiin aina kunnan köyhyys. Opin
tarpeellisuudesta ei liioin mainittu ja tuskinpa sellaista tunnettiinkaan.
Kuntakokouksissa puhuivat yksinomaan kokouksen puheenjohtaja ja
rohkein kirkonkylän isäntä.

Tässäkin kansakouluasiassa uteliaana vainuttiin, mitä pastori

Lönnrot asiasta ajatteli. Niin että jos pastori vastustaa, niin on
kaikkien vastustettava. Ulkopuolella kunnan rajojen pidettiin aivan
varmana, että pastori Lönnrot oli vastustamisen alkusyy. Mikäli
kuitenkin jälkeenpäin koulun perustamisvuosilla on käynyt selville, ei
Lönnrot nimenomaan koulua vastustanut, jos ei lie sen
perustamiseenkaan yllyttänyt. Lönnrot on ensimäisenä miehenä
rakennustoimikunnassa ratkaisemassa monin pulmallisia
kysymyksiä.

Lokakuun 26 päivänä 1891 äänestetään kuntakokouksessa

ensikerran kansakoulun perustamisesta ja kokouksen pöytäkirjaan
kirjoitetaan vieretysten puoltajain ja vastustajain nimet. Kokous oli
niin kansanvaltainen, että laskettiin mies ja ääni. Tämä kokous
sitäpaitsi oli jotenkin mieslukuinen, kun 29 ääntä annettiin koulun
puolesta ja 28 vastaan. Tämä yhden äänen voitto ei kuitenkaan
aiheuttanut kunnan puolelta enempiä toimenpiteitä.

Mutta läänin kuvernööri ei Ristijärven kuntaa jättänyt rauhaan.

Edelleen tuli kiertokirjeitä, joissa kehoitettiin ottamaan tämä
koulukysymys tositolkulla käsille.

Asiasta pidetään taas kuntakokous, jossa eräs viisas keksi

tempun, jonka kokous yksimielisesti hyväksyy. Päätetään
kuvernööriä kouluintoineen vetää nenästä: jos valtio antaa kunnalle,
olikohan 40,000 markkaa, niin koulu otetaan. Kokouksen
päätöksestä annetaan pöytäkirjan-otteella tieto kuvernöörille, mutta
kuvernööri otti tämän asiakirjan suoranaisena härsyttelynä kunnan
puolelta ja vaati pitämään uuden kokouksen.

Tämä kuvernöörin halulla hartaalla kunnalle tarjoama karvas pala

nielaistaan sitten toukokuun 14 päivä 1893. Ja tässä samassa
kunnan kokouksessa on myöskin kysymys valtiolainan pyytämisestä
syömäviljan ostoa varten. Hyrynsalmen piirin nimismiehen sanotaan
olleen kokouksessa läsnä. Jälkeen kokouksen kierteli huhu, että jos
kunta nytkään ei olisi taipunut kansakoulua perustamaan, olisi
nimismies samalla antanut tietää että turhaa on pyytää valtiolta
syöntilainaakaan, sillä valistuksen vastustajat joutavat kuolla
nälkään. Tuskinpa huhussa oli perää, sillä se tuntuu perin
lapselliselta.

Saman vuoden marraskuun 13 päivänä päätetään ostaa Alangon

tilasta läheltä kirkkoa koulupalsta 350 markan hinnalla.
 En tiedä minkä verran valtio sitten antoi kunnalle koulun
rakennusapua rahassa, mutta rakennuspuita saatiin kuitenkin
Hyrynsalmelta ottaa niin paljon kuin haluttiin ja mitä parasta metsää.
Eikä Ristijärven kunta ollut ottaessa tyhmä, vaan tavaran
tallentamisessa, sillä kun kunta ylijääneitä puita meinasi kuvernöörin
luvalla myydä tukkiyhtiölle rahasta, ilmoittikin kuvernööri
nimismiehelle, että ne ovatkin myytävät, valtion hyväksi.

Koulun päärakennuksen seinät pisteli kokoon Moilanen

Kajaanista.

Ensimäisenä opettajana koulussa pari ensimäistä vuotta oli

maisteri Antero Vuotila Oulusta. Kävi joskus, kirkon pöntössäkin
seurakuntalaisille saarnaamassa. — Vuotila oli luonteeltaan reipas,
tarinoi paikkakuntalaisten kanssa kaikista asioista mielellään.

Mutta kansakouluhistoriaan liittyy vielä eräs pieni

tietämättömyyden piirre. Silloin kun opettajan virka sanomalehdissä
päätettiin julistaa avonaiseksi, järjestettiin myöskin opettajan
palkkaedut. Peltoa m.m. luvattiin sellainen kaistale, johon ohran
siementä kylvettäisiin noin 1 hehtolitra. Kunnan ukot arvelivat, että
tällaista pinta-alaa nimitetään hehtaariksi. Kirjoitettiin palkkaetuihin 1
hehtaari peltoa. Monen vuoden perästä koetettiin kieltää ja selittää
miten se ajateltiin, vaan se oli myöhäistä. Sitten suostuttiin antamaan
peltoa kuten määritelmästä kokouksen pöytäkirjassa näkyy.